Levels moving more Quickly than my content

I was in the same boat as you the first time I levelled up. I got through my radicals, and moved onto kanji, which made sense. Then I finished my kanji, did my reviews, and then expected to move onto vocab, but while I did, the dashboard changed and it confused me! I was left wondering where I was supposed to go - was it supposed to work on vocab? Move onto the radicals and kanji for level 2? I went and looked back into the detail of how Wanikani works, especially using the link that @seanblue gave you. Then it made more sense.

I can see where you’re coming from, in that it probably would be nice to have a visual representation of the vocab you’re currently learning, but agree with the other comments you’ve had here. But looking at just how much vocab is in some of the levels, it really would be so cluttered on the dashboard that it probably wouldn’t be that helpful.

There are some userscripts that I use to give me some visual representation of my progress. The main one is [Userscript] Dashboard Level Progress Detail. update to broken script, which shows me a progress bar for all of the levels I’m currently working on.

I have another userscript installed that shows me the SRS level of the kanji and vocab when I’m on the actual kanji/vocab pages, not the dashboard. [Is there a script that shows previous level progress? - #11 by razorcat]

They might help scratch your itch a bit.

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hahaha. Bad wording on my part. I should have asked the question more carefully. Apologies to Haios.

Yes, this and only this. I don’t want to see “thousands” of vocab words at the same time. Just like the radicals and the kanji, to have little progress bars, and the level dashboard doesn’t change to the next level until you fill them up. It felt weird to me to have the level view moved when I was still being introduced to new vocabulary items for the first time.

I don’t expect it to happen though and I recognize that almost everyone on WK is more experienced with it than I am and you have all worked out what seems to work the best for the greatest number of people. I still think it’s a great system, and I found a good work around. Also, I’m sure I’ll get more used to it as I go.

Thanks for the reply

One idea that has come up is requiring vocab to get to Guru for leveling up as well, but more as a safeguard against abuse. Right now to pass Level X you need to Guru 90% of the kanji from Level X. The suggestion would be that to pass Level X you need to Guru 90% of the kanji from Level X and 90% of the vocab from Level X-1. This way, everyone would have to do their vocab, even if on a slight delay.

It still wouldn’t fix the dashboard concern unless they also restructured the system a bit more.

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My advice - don’t skip vocab. Vocab is the language, kanjis are the alphabet (a bit lengthy of course).
My recent example: vocab 漿題. Two kanjis are “logde” and “topic”. Vocab’s meaning is “homework”. No deduction from kanjis meanings is possible (imho), you just need to know the vocab itself.

About leveling up strategies, I use couple of scripts to rearrange vanilla WK more to my liking (Reorder Ultime 2 and Lesson Filter). But I have strict self-imposed rule that I finish pre-previous level vocab before working on current level.

For example I just leveled up to L15 and new radical and kanjis are tempting, but I wont touch any of them until I finish all remaining vocab lessons for L13. After this I’ll eat all radicals in one gulp (radicals part becomes much smaller after L10), and proceed with daily mix of L15 kanjis and L14 vocab. Limiting number of daily lessons to the amount I can review later (8-12 per day). Level up thing is a pure gamification. I try to measure my success by the percent of total lessons completed, right now I’m at 2170 lessons done with 6710 remaining (easy to see with “Dashboard locked count” script and absolutely wonderful “Heatmap”).

I know if’t s bit of an off-topic answer to your question. Just note that the accumulative load of reviews may become over-bearing very soon. WK does not feel slow after L5 if you’re new to Japanese.

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Sounds like a good idea. That would at least keep your dashboard on the current level long enough to be introduced to the vocab before having the dashboard changed to the next level. Maybe I’l stumble across a script that allow for this at some point. I’m not really capable of creating it myself. :roll_eyes:

It doesn’t especially feel slow to me now. :dizzy_face:

The vocab existing to reenforce the kanji doesn’t mean there won’t be plenty of it, but it means that the chosen words may be uncommon, overly formal, or hardly ever written in kanji. It also means that common words or hiragana / katakana-only words may not be here at all, leading to gaps in vocab knowledge if not backed up by another source.

That’s also why leveling up is based on guru’ing kanji and not vocab. Since I generally front-load my vocab studies over kanji, I tend to guru most vocab first, which leaves me with more space for picking up vocab on the next level as well. It’s a slower method, but has helped me push higher volumes of lessons on level-up. For new users though, I would just go with vanilla WK and follow it until you get a better feel of how it works.

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Your level is really just a number, so I wouldn’t worry about it. WK will still give you all the vocab lessons from the previous level before moving on to new radicals/kanji so you aren’t missing anything by leveling up.

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This. Surprised that it’s only mentioned once, as the OP’s question is exactly the reason I installed this script. At level 2/3 I had no idea how many vocab lessons were left before the new radicals would show up (unless you’re running scripts you can’t tell this from the lessons buttons either), which felt really weird. You were basically staring at a non-moving no-progress panel for 3 days.

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Same. I started out trying to blast through levels and I realized that I wasn’t really learning the Kanji very well. I was overtaxing my brain and trying to remember too much, too fast. Along with WaniKani, I am also using KameSame for production, BunPro for grammar, and trying to speak to my Japanese family that I live with here in Japan, admittedly with very limited and broken Japanese. I’ve gone from the 8-day level-up to about 12-14 days now, is it about the same for you? I started working full-time and I think it’s going to increase to 14-16 days per level, which is fine with me since I am actually learning, I can read a lot of signs and the news tickers on TV and get an idea of what’s happening, etc. This way just feels like I’m learning more.

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not at all, since I don’t live in Japan, have no one in real life to speak Japanese with, also work full time, while learning Japanese as a hobby and outlet :slight_smile: Slowed down to 20 days per level due to working overtime recently. But as long as I’m making progress, I’m happy.

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I really wish it worked this way by default
 I never understood why vocab doesn’t count towards leveling up - it contains lots of other readings and extra meanings!

I really dislike being considered already on a new level when I haven’t finished at least the lessons from the previous one
 I like the Tsurukame pie charts for visualizing the number of radicals/kanji/vocab my current level has (that could be a nice solution for the official WK dashboard), but of course they change to the new level when we level up


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Hi rwesterhof,

I installed Tampermonkey, open framework and the Dashboard level progress, but I don’t see any change. Maybe I have to change a setting somewhere?

Thanks,

Have you tried refreshing the page? You usually need to do this for the script to kick in.

The script itself is currently not actively being updated, and as such requires a manual update to function alongside the dashboard updates from March. This holds for some other scripts as well, but you can usually find manual fixes for any such issues in the specific threads of the scripts.
In this case here, which granted, is slightly buried in 100 other posts.

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Ok! Brilliant. Working now. I seriously never would have figured that out. lol.

Thanks

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So, I just realized that my Dashboard no longer shows the regular progress of the radicals and kanji. Is this script supposed to trade that for the level bars?
I really want both things, not one or the other


Thanks

Yes, Dashboard Level Progress Detail only displays bars and hides the individual items.
There are other scripts you can try. From what you’re saying, I’m guessing

might be the best fit. There’s also

but that one doesn’t display previous-level items I think. Go ahead and see what fits your needs best!

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Ok. Thanks for the additional suggestions!
I am a novice with “scripts” so I found it a bit confusing. :confused:

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