Milestone notes upon completing levels 1-10.
Mnemonics are the joy and frustration of WaniKani. Silly stories help: Bring on the Geoduck 
However… verbs don’t always end with “る”, so why not help me there!? I’m struggling with the many mnemonics that are insufficient for recall because they ‘cover’ only the Kanji. This may become less of an issue once I’m able to read other stuff than basic children’s books.
For now I rely on recall and vocabulary reinforcement to remember the Kanji. Looking back at what Kanjis I’ve failed to pass through enlightened level, I spot the ones with the fewest vocabs, the least helpful (for me) mnemonics and the exceptions. Few surprises there.
After 2 days clearing up vocab from the previous level, I’ve started level 11 doing the lessons in the default order. Keeping my pace of ca. 20 lessons/day ( now 7*3), split into 2 sessions, I wonder how long it will take to level up? Anyway, it’s all about the journey, one review at a time.
Looking forward to the next Geoduck surprise.
3 Likes
I’d be interested to see how your level up time is affected once you have it.
I personally had been doing 14 lessons a day and was reliably hitting ~11-13 days on the level ups before the new algorithm launched.
I had quite literally just hit level 10 when the new algorithm launched, so I also decided to give it a try and see how it goes. I bumped up to 15 lessons a day (5*3) and otherwise have been faithfully hitting every interval just as before.
For this level, the level up time has increased significantly. I’m currently already at 14 days and it will be another 3 days for the remaining kanji to guru meaning it will have taken 17 days versus what would’ve been 13 days before.
However, it also looks like I will have a lot less level 10 vocabulary left to do when I hit level 11, so it will probably roughly level out on the next level.
Concretely, I had 78 level 9 vocabulary to get through when starting level 10, and it looks like I’ll only have 21 level 10 vocabulary to get through when starting level 11 due to the new algorithm.
1 Like
thanks for sharing your experience, that is good to know. I’m 4 days through the level and the Tsurukame stats say it will take me at least another 7 days. That would make it roughly 11-12 days total, not far off my previous 9 day average + 2 days to clear the vocab backlog. Will update with actual times.
1 Like
Following up on this, I just leveled up and it did end up taking 16 days 23 hours. I also ended up with 21 remaining level 10 vocabulary as expected.
Given that, it’ll probably even out back to about 11-13 days. I’ll try to remember to update this thread with the final results.
1 Like
Congrats on levelling up! I have been slowed down by the crabigator. Since yesterday my lessons have run dry. Something in the automated lesson picker is misaligned with how I’ve paced myself; basically there aren’t enough items in the daily queue to maintain my steady pace of 20 lessons per day.
I’ll have to rethink my strategy…
1 Like
Thanks.
Yeah, I could see how that would happen. I’m only doing 15 lessons a day and I was down to only 6 lessons right before I leveled up, so if I had missed one of the last 2 kanji and not leveled up I would’ve been in the same position of not having enough lessons.
Finally levelled up 
after 10.5 days on level 11 items, with 10 vocab carried over, including a surprise level 9 laggard thanks to the Big Reshuffle.
The nifty chart from @Cookie316 ‘s progress tracker shows how switching to Today’s Lesson drastically slowed down my ability to keep an even pace.
Replacing a few vocabs with kanjis using the lesson picker should do the trick… might be worth leaving the kanjis with fewest vocabs for the end, to minimise the number of leftover items upon levelling up 
?
2 Likes
Congrats!
Something I’ve been doing on this second level I’m using the new algorithm with for testing is doing one batch of lessons and then explicitly going back to the home page without continuing to start a next the batch. This has the effect of selecting more radicals and kanji than doing it continuously because the algorithm tries to force at least one of each type into the selection for the day’s lessons. Thus, instead of only getting 1 or 2 radicals and 2 kanji, it ends up doing at least 3 of each since you’re effectively starting the day’s lessons 3 times instead of 1. That has the effect of allowing more things to unlock more quickly to help avoid running out of lessons.
That said, once I finish this level, I’ll probably just start using the lesson picker manually because the algorithm really seems quite inefficient. For example, it doesn’t try to pick the radicals that unlock multiple kanji first, nor kanji that unlock more vocabulary first, etc. I do like the interspersing it does in general though. It just needs to be smarter about not resulting in artificially stalling you.
I want to give the algorithm a fair shake with 2 levels to see how it compares first though.
1 Like
Thanks, and yes, going the manual way seems sensible. Good luck!
1 Like
This will be my final update, but I figured I’d follow up since I’ve now leveled up a second using the new algorithm with the aforementioned technique and 15 lessons a day. The only time I got extremely close to running out was one day before I leveled up where I got down to 3 lessons. Had I missed any critical reviews at any point, it would have definitely stalled me. That also means anything more than 15 lessons a day with the new algorithm is guaranteed to artificially stall you versus doing it the old way.
Given that, it really seems to me like the new algorithm could use some tweaks as it is definitely not time efficient, but I doubt they’ll do that since it would require a lot more logic to deal with potentially competing goals.
1 Like
Nice! I also just levelled up 乾杯 
I went with the lesson picker, leaving the last group of kanjis with the fewest vocabs for the end. This allowed me to finish with 7 outstanding vocabs going into the next level. This time I managed to keep an even number of lessons throughout, split in 2 sessions as before.
It ended up being more ‘efficient’ in a way than the Today’s Lessons, but I am glad I tried the new algorithm.
First, it was great to see the list of Apprentice items melt away. Second, it made me realise how fast one can reduce the review load by slowing down on lessons. It’s one thing to read about it but quite another to experience it firsthand 
For now I will continue to go for quantity over quality as far as possible, but I’m happy to step on the brakes when the going gets tough.
1 Like
