Many New Lessons!

[SoraR]

@jamielin

Yes, because I was that child last year
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

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.

[quollism]

@royalscorchio

When you get a bunch of new lessons at once, say 30 or 40, is it best to do them all at once or space them out a few days?

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.

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!

[GrumpyPanda]

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.

[rokon]

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!

[royalscorchio]

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

[jamielin]

@SoraR

The real benefit of doing Radicals and Kanji “out of order” is to have control of your pacing.

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