My apologies if this is a duplicate. I looked around and didn’t see a thread specifically addressing this question.
Anyway, my understanding is that once an item is burned it never appears again. That means that, eventually, you achieve a steady state with reviews (assuming no change in lesson rate or accuracy). At an average of 95% accuracy, does anybody know the average maximum reviews per day to complete WaniKani in a year?
I’m trying to map out my study schedule. Any input would be much appreciated.
I’m not sure if you can be certain that your 95% accuracy at lvl 8 will remain through all of the levels. I know mine fell sharply when the enlightened and master levels started to pile up.
At 85% I have around 240-350 reviews per day. 95% would drastically reduce it to maybe 200-250 reviews per day?
Keep in mind that if you do the speed levels (later on some levels can be done in like 3 days) at max speed, your reviews will completely go bonkers (some had to deal with upwards of 400-500 reviews per day). I know that I’ll try to stay at 1 level per week, and just finish in 14 months instead of 12.
I know I’m not answering your question, but I think It’d be better to find a pace of lessons/day that you personally feel comfortable with, and build that into your study schedule.
Spend some of the time that would go to more reviews in WK on reading, grammar, listening practice etc, it’ll bring you up to a more balanced level quicker, rather than just knowing a lot of kanji in a year.
when i was speedrunning i was regularly doing 300 reviews per day. that was before burns started coming in. and not yet in fast levels.
and yeah, at level 8 i was still getting 95% accuracy. that might well take a dip.
i’ve seen people saying 500 per day.
my recommendation would be to spend less time on WK, and more on grammar and reading. the speedrunner who finishes WK but can’t read a simple text is a trope, but it’s a trope for a reason.
I did WK in a little over a year, 14 months or something. I averaged 350-425 reviews a day, some days was upwards of 500, with an accuracy above 90%. I spent 1-1.5h daily on reviews alone. And then an hour or two on lessons a week. So probably 1.5h a day solely on WK and that is if you type fast, forget about doing it on a phone. So WK 1.5h daily minimum. Doesn’t sound that bad? It’s far worse than it looks because you will need immersion as well, probably aim at twice the amount of kanji study you do, that alone is around 5hrs a day. Then grammar study for 20-30min or something. It’s quickly getting into full time job area and I know this because I did it (and much more). If you are a masochist, go for it, but it will be hell.
On the other hand I managed to improve fairly quickly, even though I paid with my sanity.
You can only do WK, I guess, but you will highly regret it.
Note that the number of reviews is in fact higher since apprentice items come back several times in a day (and I need to do around 20 lessons/day to keep pace, so those are on top too). The real number is probably around 300/day.
Also I haven’t hit the “fast” levels yet, those can be done in half the time and therefore with an even greater review count.
I absolutely do not recommend going for the 1y target. I personally will slow down in a couple of weeks when I hit level 40. Honestly I should have slowed down earlier, probably around level 30, but I set an objective and I want to reach it.
Going full speed early on is well worth it because you get great returns for it, the kanji you learn are super common and you see them all the time (at least, most of them). But once you reach ~1000 kanji returns start diminishing sharply.
Going at this pace all the way, and even speeding up for the “fast” levels is completely absurd to me. The only reason to do it is for the achievement itself, if the objective is to learn Japanese efficiently I’d say it’s counter-productive.
OR you could just go at a pace that works for you and finish when you finish.
My first time doing WK I tried to speed run the thing and it seriously made my life impossible. I suggest limiting the number of new lessons you do every day to about 10-15 and you’ll probably finish in the same time with less frustration.
Your review numbers seem very similar to mine, are you using WK stats to determine the %? They’re quite wrong from my experience, I’m at around 94% according to them, but the actual numbers are closer to 85% : O
I did feel that 95% was too high, I think I’m around 90% in practice, but all the tools I know to get more detailed stats have been broken since WK disabled the review API…
Fluent? No. Insane? Maybe. But I think I’m gonna pace myself from what I’m reading.
That’s just an approximate average. Often, about half of the ones I miss are really just typos too, but 95% is without adjusting anything. As others already mentioned, that may decline as I move up.
I’m trying to speedrun because I already know many kanji and vocab words. I passed the N2 last year, took Japanese classes for ~6 years and lived in Japan for one year. I just want to keep the kanji I know fresh in my memory and catch up on the ones I missed during my previous studies. That’s why I can keep up with this (so far).
I have about 250 reviews per day and I try to do them in two batches, one in the morning, one at night. My accuracy was around 95% until I started a new job with more working hours and I was so tired at night that my accuracy dropped to 80-85% due to typos. And that significantly slowed me down.
I joined about 6 months ago and am now close to finishing level 22. So it will take me longer than a year, maybe 1,5 years, even if I can keep up the current pace.
Would I recommend doing this? Only if you already know a lot of Japanese and if you have enough time to spare. Some days I spend more than 2 hours on WK, doing 50 new lessons and 200 reviews… They really do pile up quickly.
I’ve been trying to get over 70 reviews since a week