Leveling up very slowly, am I doing something wrong?

I came to this site after I already knew about 500 kanji, so for the beginning part I just did lessons and reviews as soon as they were available, because I wasn’t actually “learning” them at that point.

There isn’t really a time one can say is “good” except whatever is best for a given person.

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Okay, thank you for the response, I really appreciate the help :slight_smile:

8-10 days per level is still pretty fast and not sustainable for a lot of people. How many lessons do you do per day on average? Would doing 10-15 lessons a day be too much for you?

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Ah, I usually keep them under 50. I should move up to 100 haha, thank you a lot for your insight! :slight_smile:

I usually do around 5-10, but it really depends on how much studying I have to do for my exams. I often have trouble remembering vocab, especially. The kanji/radicals are honestly fine for me.

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So in days you have kanji or radicals, you can do 10-15 a day, and then 5-10 a day for vocab until you run out of lessons and wait for more to be unlocked. Would that work for you?

You can also change lesson ordering to Ascending then Shuffled, which means the harder vocab lessons would be interspersed with easier radicals and kanji.

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80 - 95 isn’t that bad, especially if you’ve just learned the new items. And remembering vocabulary will become easier too since there are many who have an obvious reading/meaning.

That being said, there are a number of memorization techniques that could help you to go faster. Here’s a link I found after a quick search that seems reasonable. Maybe it’ll help :slight_smile:

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How fast you can go depends on how much time you can spend on wanikani everyday. If you can’t spend the required time to memorize all your items, then going too fast will probably overwhelm you with too many reviews.

If you do have the time for it, there are some things you can do to optimize your speed and go a little faster, using the mnemonics, doing your reviews 3 times a day (morning, noon, evening), using scripts to learn the radicals and kanji early on the level etc…

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I’m not sure how to change my lesson order. Also, if I did change the order to Ascending, would it hurt my process?

Thank you! :slight_smile:

This is about how quickly I’ve been leveling up as well. Like others have said on this thread, it depends on how quickly you’re doing your lessons and how long you able to spend on WaniKani every day. I can only normally do about 3-6 lessons every other day, so I’m going pretty slowly. But I’ve noticed that a lot of the newer vocab that I’m getting has obvious readings/meanings or have the same readings as the kanji. So once I get past the kanji, the vocab portions tends to speed up a bit, despite it being a lot more than the kanji.
Just make sure you’re at a pace that you’re comfortable with. If it begins to get overwhelming, don’t be afraid to slow down a bit, maybe adding in a few lessons every other day or so.

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I’m on mobile so it might not be exact, but there should be an icon on the top right of WK to get to the settings page. The option is under account - > settings - > app.

You can choose to shuffle every lesson in your queue, order by level then shuffle, or keep the default you probably have it set to now.

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I haven’t seen anyone address this like I would, so I just wanted to propose a level routine for your comparison. Keep in mind, the best thing to do is find the pace that matches you, overwhelming yourself is no good either. Also, I struggle to maintain this ideal myself, but it can serve as a guideline. I’m more comfortable with the idea of 14 day levels. If we take that as an example, I’ll break down how I’d approach level 4 if I reset tomorrow.

Radicals: Normally I’d recommend doing all the radicals in one day since they’re relatively more memorable and generally unique. That’s fine and dandy for me, from level 7 onward there’s usually only about 15 radicals or less, save one or two exceptions. However, level 4 has 33 radicals, so since that’s a big number it’s fair to split that across a few days. Say:

  • Day 1-3: 10 radicals per day
    *assuming lesson batches of 5 or so.

Kanji: Level 4 has 39 kanji. I’d also split that into four blocks of 10 lessons.

  • Day 4-7: 10 kanji per day

*Using this template, the earliest you could level up is on Day 10, after guru’ing your final set of kanji. Assuming you fail a kanji or two, it could vary by a few days (Day 14, etc).

Alternatively, if you do 5 kanji a day (because they’re harder/take more time than radicals, imo:

  • Day 4-11: 5 kanji
    *With Guru/level up being Day 14-18.

Vocabulary: Level 4 has 112 vocab which unlock once you guru all the kanji required to read them. As you may know, vocab aren’t level sensitive but skipping them is a very bad idea xD I read that you find vocab the hardest part. That’s the opposite to me, I find kanji harder and vocab the easiest. For that reason, I binge my vocab in blocks of 20/30 per day when they become available. Because of the way I plan out my lessons, that typically can coincide with the level up, in which case I prioritise vocab lessons before next level radicals or kanji. This can have the effect of adding 1-3 days onto my next level, since I might have already levelled up by that time.

Since you find vocab the hardest, and you are time-limited with school, you may prefer doing more kanji lessons per day and taking your time with vocab. In that case, it’s a little more awkward timing wise since you’ll probably be 7 days in before you guru your first kanji, thus unlocking vocab.

Regarding motivation and having long level up times, take a look at this:


I’ve been in my final year of uni, so WK has been very slow going. I haven’t leveled up in less than 29 days since level 9. There’s plenty of us not achieving 8-10 day levels, so don’t think you’re alone =P.

And if it’s any consolation, imo the workload gets easier later on. There’s less radicals in later levels, without any real increase in vocab or kanji. Take a look:


I hope this was helpful, and feel free to ask if you need anything :slight_smile:

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Don’t forget, that you always have like 40-50 vocab lessons before the first new radical will appear. At least if you don’t use the reorder script. That way your schedule might end up being a bit longer.

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Ah, dang it. Thanks for the reminder. I’ve been using the script so long (with no success to speak of :rofl:) that I forgot about those. Though it’s all relative because that just means the next level would be a little shorter on account of you having done those before you level up.

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Thank you so much for your informative reply! You are very kind :slight_smile:

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For what it’s worth, I did 12 lessons a day (but often skipping one or two days per level if I was busy/tired), and I leveled up in about 15 days. But that was with a script to optimize the process a bit (linked to below).


Oh man, I probably average about 70% these days. Anything over 80% is pretty good in my opinion.


If you don’t mind using scripts, another option is to use Lesson Filter. It will let you mix radical, kanji, and vocab lessons together in whatever combination you want. That way you can mix stuff you find easier and stuff you find harder together, instead of having days of easy stuff followed by days of hard stuff. Just make sure you do 2-3 times as much vocab as kanji, or you’ll start to build a backlog.

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I do about 30 new items a week, depending on my work schedule and my energy level. If it gets to be too much, l scale back. If they’re easy, l add more. I take a few weeks to level up. I would rather go slowly so it is still fun, instead of burning out. Sometimes l look ahead of time at new radicals. It really helps.

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And l would be THRILLED to usually get over 80% consistently on my reviews. My results are all over the map, but often in the 70’s and 80’s. Once in a while l see the coveted 100%, but more often than l would like to admit, the 60’s or even below, especially if I have recently woken up😊.

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