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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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 
?
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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.
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Thanks, and yes, going the manual way seems sensible. Good luck!
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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.
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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.
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Milestone notes upon completing levels 11-20.
My strategy for going through those levels within my limitations:
- lessons: 10 items, with at most 5 kanjis per batch, do all radicals upon unlock.
- if possible, 2 batches of lessons, one before 8am, one after 4pm
- this has made my reviews manageable to ~65 items (basically 10 x 6 SRS stages + failed items), twice a day (one before 8am, another before 8pm)
- add to that the apprentice1 review at noon, which generally only contains 10 items; the second app1 review gets folded into the evening reviews
To ensure I don’t run out of lessons, I use the Tsurukame app to go through the kanjis for the upcoming level and prioritise the ones that will unlock 4+ vocabs upon guru.
I limit the number of items carried over when levelling up by holding off on kanjis when guru-ing the radicals: that usually means keeping 4 kanjis for the second day after they are unlocked.
Without changing my routine of 10 lessons twice a day, I ended up spending 8 days per level, with roughly 30 items carried over. When work interfered, I just stopped lessons for a day.
What I’ve learned:
- some WK levels seem to set one up for failure
: they contain a few kanjis reinforced with loads of vocabs, and a large majority of kanjis with barely any vocab, or with vocab appearing only in much later levels
- recall on the KaniWani app works best for me if I use it as a drill: pass item or put it back in the review queue until it finally passes. Some vocab is so hard, I’ve ended up putting it back in the queue almost 10 times, even after seeing the answer
- grammar sends me to sleep, and I don’t have the stamina to add bunpro reviews to my daily load, so I read grammar points and listen to the examples.
- I’m enjoying the Spring “read every day” challenge, even if my “reading” essentially boils down to listening to an episode on Satori reader and guessing roughly how the sentences are structured… one has to start somewhere
…
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Milestone notes upon completing levels 21-30.
After a couple of levels, it became impractical to practice recall with KaniWani due to the amount of synonyms. Instead I focused on practicing reading with Satori, at least one episode every day.
Reading did not replace recall to help with WK reviews. I’ve ended up spending time instead customizing mnemonics, and using other Kanji learning sources such as Jisho.org, Kanji Damage and etymology guides. At this point, I am seeing the limitations of WK. It seems like it was written for second or third generation Japanese Americans (from the Pacific Northwest!) who speak Japanese fairly fluently but want to learn how to read. Any deviation from this very narrow demographic means more investment required to use this resource, and less benefits overall.
As I limited myself to spend at most a year on WK, I’ve used the long term recall (“burn”) reviews to observe how well WK worked for me and results are quite illuminating:
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3 is the minimal amount of vocabulary reinforcement items that I need to recall the meaning. Give me less reinforcement and I might as well not have learned that kanji at all.The few exceptions to this rule are words I learned before starting WK.
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I have memorized pronunciation exceptions as ‘being exceptions’, irrespective of how much I failed them in reviews. Retaining exceptional readings will require other resources. Unfortunately, there is no ignoring pronunciation even if my aim is reading: mangas like Dr Slump are 90% kana.
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I’ve memorised the meaning in my native language, not in English! More often than not, I can nail the meaning using a dictionary-like definition in English, but cannot recall the exact English word WK uses… which often differs anyway from other sources!
I am very glad that I decided early enough to systematically burn every item that had reached Enlightened level. The satisfaction of getting rid of my leeches once and for all perversely helped me finally retain at least some of them 
Practically, I think I have reached the point of lesser returns as the usefulness of the lesson material has dropped significantly. Less than a third of kanjis now come with at least 3 vocabulary items in the same level, not enough for me to retain beyond guru.
While I investigate alternatives to WK to help with reading in Japanese, I am continuing my daily routine but treating reviews as a drill. At this point my aim with WK is no longer retention, but gaining some familiarity with the material.
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Milestone notes upon reaching level 40.
Phew! After a year of doggedly ploughing my way through WK, I have reached the end of this part of my Japanese learning journey. Level 40 is my happy place
The timing was great too: after reaching level 40, I switched to doing reviews only, just before going on vacation overseas. My subscription ended during the flight back home.
Looking back at lvl 31-39:
- I feel like I’ve learned how to learn kanji, a very satisfying outcome of sticking with this method. Lessons and short term retention became easier as I started to figure out how to tease out some of the meanings and, in a few cases, the phonetic components of each kanji.
- the choices I’ve made to go through a maximum amount of material in the shortest time I could muster, came at a cost: by a generous estimate, I’ve memorised the WK meaning of about 60-70% of kanji and vocab, and maybe 30% of the pronunciation. I had low expectations, so I’m quite happy!
- what first passed as minor WK flaws became sources of mild irritation:
— mnemonics that contained sentences without verbs, with ambiguous phrasing or odd syntax
— insufficient support to help distinguish between synonyms and lookalikes
— unhelpful or even confusing context sentences, where I can’t even figure out what part of the sentence corresponds to the kanji 
— “This is a jukugo word that uses the on’yomi readings of the kanji. You should be able to read this on your own.”… when one of the kanjis has 2 on’yomi readings
— kanji with no associated vocabulary that reinforces the main meaning
— morphing radicals, see recurring threads on this forum about the winter radical, for example
I suppose the occasional inconsistencies and sloppiness stood out more in later levels, when I most missed the quirky and irreverent humour of the earlier material. Even though I find that @koichi lacks Steve Shultz’s level of rigour and consistency, I’m happy overall with the WK experience and look forward to the next chapter of my learning journey
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