I’m asking the questions to all the aliens out there who finished wanikani in around a year ;
Did you guys wake up at night just to complete your reviews ?
Also, how many lessons were you doing each day ?
Thanks in advance to all my alien fellas
Rarely after midnight, no alarm clock, but do reviews 2-3 times per day for as long as I can tolerate, maybe 200-300 per day, and with reorder back-and-forth. Around 100 of extra Anki.
A few months over a year. No actual regrets.
I did it in like 18 months but there’s basically two parts to going fast:
- Your retention of learned kanji. This kind of mostly depends on you (age, aptitude, how much else you have going on in your life competing for your mental focus). There are some things you can do to improve here (like drilling a kanji after the first lesson or a failed review), but I find fighting this one too much is a recipe for burnout.
- System related things. Some examples:
- The first two stages are 4 and 8 hour intervals, so if you do reviews at morning, lunch and before bed you can get items to apprentice 3 on day 1, while if you do them once a day it will take you three days (and increases the chance you will forget and fail those later reviews)
- To complete a level you need to finish 95% of the kanji, but for most levels like 30% of the kanji are going to require you to complete a radical of the same level first. Doing a radical > kanji > vocab lesson order will let you advance faster.
But a word of warning: if you rely on tricks from the second bucket to the point that you have so many items in progress in the first bucket and you’re review accuracy drops too low as a result, you’ll have more workload from all the extra repeat reviews and having too many items you’re trying to learn at once will also reduce your accuracy as there’s more room for confusion between items you haven’t concretely learned yet. So it’s more important to find a workload that matches your learning rate and lifestyle first, and only after that look at tricks to optimise the systems limits.
Thanks for your answer ! That’s really interesting.
So my situation right now is kinda like this : I know pretty much half of the kanjis/vocabs i get in my lessons, cause I learned them from a different source. Recently I went from 20 lessons cap and not doing them every day (like i had litteral weeks without doing lessons in the past) to 25 lessons cap that I’m doing everyday.
Sincerely my biggest problem having passed the halfway point is just english vocabulary.
I’m not english native (as you probably noticed) and I often struggle more on the english translation of the card than on its reading.
I’ll try doing my first review batch in the morning so I can have them apprentice 3 in the evening, as you recommended.
Thanks for answering !
I think it all boils down to consistency.
I always do reviews multiple times per day as they become available, and prioritize learning radicals to unlock kanji as soon as possible.
While it’s possible to finish in about a year, it massively depends on your abilities, time available and what you want to prioritize in your studies.
In my view, it’s better to be consistent rather than to be on the edge of burnout all the time, especially since learning kanji is just a part of actually learning Japanese.
I was on track to finish in about a year but massively slowed down after ~lv25.
The thing is, the first few levels are pretty much required to read anything, but as you go into the higher levels, you learn Kanji that are less frequent, so the return on investment starts dinimishing.
In the end you have to chose what your goals are, I know people that learned a ton of kanji and vocabulary but are still barely able to hold a conversation. Others can talk fluently but still struggle with reading.
It’s important to also spend time on other aspects of the language, and going all in on WK might take away from that. (or not, if you have the the time and motivation, by all means go for it)
I finished in 357 days about a month ago. I never had to wake up at night.
I did have the main leveling kanji review time on my alarm, and they were always at the same time every week, so reviews came in waves afterward.
In the fast levels I had days with like 700 reviews and 150 new lessons, which were draining not gonna lie.
Overall I don’t really recommend it, I just couldn’t stop myself from doing it. At level 40 Kanji are far from your bottleneck unless you have a thousand hours of exposure.
