Many New Lessons!

Read this guide

It’ll help you better understand how WK works then you can decide how many lessons you will be comfortable with and how many lessons/day you need to reach your target speed.

Generally if you do your radicals and kanji lessons right away when theyre available and about 20/days then you’ll be going 7 days/level while clearing your lesson stack before levelling up.

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I do all radicals, then wait a few hours to one day, then all kanji, wait, and then all vocab. Lessons tend to come in that order so its not too difficult.

Otherwise I just do one huge chunk and get 0 0

I only limit 15 lessons per day and less than 100 apprentices. This way, there’s space in my brain for SRS-ing vocabulary words, grammar, listening and reading. Take it slow, it’s a marathon not a sprint :grinning:

I found that natural order is more efficient for my brain than artificially manipulate the order and be in rush doing radicals and kanji in order to fast level up. This is because vocabs need longer time to master than just radicals and kanji.

Well, do what works for you and prioritize. Some users here are doing only kanji so it’s good to do the lessons all at once in order to level up fast. If you’re doing more than just kanji, it would be best to limit the time needed so you can have other things to learn.

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Plus vocab is far more important in remembering your readings and becoming literate in the language. Always seems weird to me when people neglect the vocab to rush through radicals and kanji when those are the least useful of the three things WK teaches when actually reading.

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That’s like saying your ABC doesnt matter for reading english. Kanji make up the vocab, how could they be less important. All of them are important.

I didn’t say “doesn’t matter” anywhere in my post. But, jukugo words don’t always have a meaning that can just be created from the piecing together the individual kanji. That’s why vocab is much more important.

Take for example: 弁当. If you only learned the individual kanji, you won’t actually know what that word means if you encountered when reading. Yes, ateji is special but even non-ateji jukugo doesn’t always just mean a literal combining of the individual kanji.

And the same time you’ll be hard pressed to recognize words with harder kanji like 躊躇 朦朧 憂鬱 瀟洒 if you haven’t actually taken time to learn the individual kanji. Especially if it’s not a size 100 font.
Recognizing, reading and meaning are all important parts of kanji. Saying they’re more or less important than vocab just seems wrong.

Even in English, just because I can pronounce the letters C, A and T doesn’t mean I know the meaning of the word “cat”.

Where did I say not to learn individual kanji? Again, knowing those words is going to be more useful than knowing the building blocks in isolation. Vocab being “more important” is not saying individual kanji are useless. You seem to be removing any and all nuance from my posts.

There’s some people that doing only kanji and catch up with reading and grammar after level 60. It’s not wrong, but for me it’s just no fun to wait for a year to finish all kanji then learn how to read a sentence.

It’s like a child forced to learn ABC for a year before reading anything. I agree, it is “weird” because it’s not a natural way to learn a language.

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Are you sure anybody actually does this?

This isnt how people level up fast

Yes, because I was that child last year :joy:
I believe many people do that too because of influence on the net in order to be cool by bragging their achievements. Why not do it the cool way, not the usual way. I realized that was just an insecurity :sweat_smile:

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Honestly, for better or for worse, I do them all. I would rather see the words over and over and over then have them sit there.

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:sweat_smile: I see

The real benefit of doing Radicals and Kanji “out of order” is to have control of your pacing. You can spread the vocabulary (second unlock from previous level + first unlock of current level) across the number of days you expect/want each level to be.

It really depends on what kinds of lessons! As much as possible, I try not to mix kanji reviews up with anything else and I try to schedule my lessons to take advantage of the SRS interval timings.

With radicals, well… radicals are generally easy and very valuable! Levelling up radicals means levelling up kanji and it’s OK to mix these with vocab a bit. :slight_smile:

With vocab, I usually do those in bulk - you will hear “have no more than 100 items in apprentice at any given time” and that’s good advice! I do 40+ vocab reviews in one go but this approach won’t suit everyone. One practice I’ve found valuable is highlighting all the meanings and readings that aren’t completely obvious.

With kanji, I try to do as little as possible that isn’t kanji for that hour so I can focus in on them. I spend time making sure the mnemonics stick and write my own if WK’s mnemonics don’t resonate with me.

Timing the lessons can make later reviews much more effective. When you do a lesson, the first review for that lesson is 4 hours later, the next review is 8 hours later, next review is 23 hours (a day minus an hour) later, then the review that takes it from apprentice to guru is 47 hours (two days minus an hour) later. These intervals all get rounded down to the nearest hour.

I try to review as closely as possible to the SRS timings. So if I do lessons at 10am and make sure to review those items at 2pm (only really practical on the weekend), all those reviews end up in the “evening” batch of reviews from now on (next review 10pm or later). If I do lessons at 6/7pm on a weeknight, I make sure to do the first review on them at 10/11pm and so those reviews will end up in the “morning” batch (next review 6am or later). If it’s too late in the day, I leave the lessons for another time.

Example: at 7pm tonight I am going to review the last kanji for Level 20 and in all likelihood level up to level 21. Thanks to WKStats, I know I have 24 bits of Level 20 vocab which will be unlocked by those kanji, plus 8 radicals and 32 kanji to cover to kick off Level 21. So that’s 64 reviews. I’ll cover off the 24 bits of level 20 vocab and get started on the radicals, but I’ll leave the kanji for tomorrow so I can focus on them especially.

I hope that’s useful!

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Come on now, I’m sure you could have made your point without shaming the guy. I could think of plenty of reasons why you might not want to learn vocab on WaniKani (but somewhere else instead).
Not sure if I would be paying for WaniKani then, but he probably has his reasons.

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heres an opinion from someone who 1) doesn’t have a lifetime membership and 2) is mainly here for the kanji (not the vocab)

I like to do my lessons right when they come out so I can maintain my leveling speed (7 days). I I do the radicals right when they come out, the first set of kanji the next day (since I have the whole week to finish them), and finally the second set of kanji right when they’re out. Each batch is usually 20-40 items so it’s not too overwhelming. And I do vocab on the days in between or whenever I feel like it, so I’m about 3 levels behind on vocab but I’m okay with it. It’s been working well for me so far!

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Good advice everyone, thanks for helping me out! :slight_smile: I want to make sure that I am building good habits from the beginning.

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I beg to differ. I found that the natural order is already optimized for controlling the pacing and reinforcing the memory. I also use iKnow based on this order: iKnow sorted by WK level

WK is faster than iKnow in this term. Each level has around 100 words, a lot more than WK for each level (for comparison: at level 19 it’s only 16 vocabs on WK, 107 on iKnow). I found that I’m still struggling to master vocab from lower levels, even at 30 words/day I’m still 8 levels behind.

Vocabs are harder to deal with, as many readings are not taught on WK you must find them elsewhere. The classic places are referring to dictionary and reading on sentences/articles, which I found was pretty boring and slow. I’d rather just SRS’ed them out since I don’t really have a good memory to begin with :sweat_smile:

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