My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK šŸ“– )

Thank you so much for the kind words and for sticking around with the #MessageMe challenge! It only shows your determination and itā€™s something you should be proud about :slight_smile:

Definitely. Our first try doing EN => JP of an item is always tough, but that shows its value. Nowadays I donā€™t learn a word without going EN => JP. Itā€™s that important to me, and I can use it both ways, in reading/listening and writing/speaking. :slight_smile:

Love them! :slight_smile: You can follow a textbook together with their Path feature and check the links they recommend. Thereā€™s always information around the internet that isnā€™t covered by textbooks, so it helps checking. You can some sweet reinforcement.

Love the way you think. I confess I somehow learn more than what I practice. Itā€™s something I personally need to get better at.

Right? Scripts arenā€™t just about leveling up faster, far from it. It just saves you lots and lots of headaches. Knowing where you stand adds safety to your WK journey.

Someone told me once that I recommend doing on this Guide the exact opposite as I actually did: going full speed. And itā€™s true. I take advantage of my speed as a way to ā€œadvertiseā€ this guide because it definitely adds pressure for people to read it and learn from it. But itā€™s not the smartest choice. I was (and still am) in a privileged position to do it. I have the time. My biggest priority right now is not feeding the kids, loving the wife, or paying the rent.

We need to be impatiently patient, i.e. going every day after what we which to accomplish, but being aware that good things take its time to accomplish :slight_smile:

No, thank you! I did it for people like you and are wishing to read it and learn from it :slight_smile: It means a lot to me that I was able to help make your life a little bit easier.

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Thank you so much for your kind reply and encouragement! Iā€™m actually smiling now. My day started with a lot of self-doubt, but Iā€™m honestly feeling better about myself now. And a little as if a celebrity talked to me, haha! :smiley: Now, off to tackle my reviewsā€¦

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Hi @jprspereira,

Thanks a lot for making this guide. One can feel the passion and the dedication, it was a really nice reading!

I am in the particular position where I read it after having burnt everything, but believe it or not, I still found it very valuable for me! Useless to say, it is a must for beginnersā€¦
Yeah, I was kind of stuck in this ā€œlevel 60 syndromā€. WK was part of my daily life for so long that it was hard for me to overcome the emptiness when my review queue hopelessly stayed at 0. I felt I had no goal with Japanese anymore, even if I am well aware how long the path remainsā€¦ My grammar and vocab are really not that advanced, and even for kanji, there is still work to do. The fact that Japanese is only a hobby of mine and that I really do not actually need it, does not helpā€¦

That is where I read your guide. And it convinced me to start something again in order to stop this feeling of stagnation. In parallel, I enjoyed so much the fresh reviews of the latest content upgrade that I considered restarting WK at level 2, but, following your advice, I decided to start with KameSame. Since a very long time, I am perfectly aware that WK trained only the ā€œrecognitionā€ side of the force, and I need to train more the ā€œrecallā€ aspect, so here I am!
And up to now, Iā€™m loving it. So thank you also to @searls for this wonderful tool!

So thank you for sharing this super guide with all of us! A lot a work, a lot of passion, and a very kind person.

See you!

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I just want to point out that I appreciate that Fairy Tail gif in the OP.

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Hey, I read your message in the morning and let me just tell you that youā€™ve made my day by letting me know my Guide was useful to someone that achieved so much success on Wanikani :slight_smile: I really appreciate your words.

Great! You did WK after all, so I truly believe that once you find something that brings you joy, you wonā€™t stop! I also do not need to learn Japanese for any particular reason, but sometimes we donā€™t need a why. We end up creating it along the way :slight_smile:

For grammar, maybe Bunpro might trigger you into studying it. For vocab extra Wanikani, Iā€™m currently doing a deck with 4500 katakana words and the well-known Core 10k :slight_smile:

Awesome! Yeah, I did stop using KaniWani, but Iā€™m :100:% learning new vocab with EN => JP as well, and I donā€™t regret a single bit. Not only I donā€™t any problems with EN => JP, but itā€™s also extra reinforcement :grin:

Thank you for the kind words :slight_smile: Let me know if I can useful to you in any other way.

Gotta appreciate Natsu and Lucy :ok_hand:

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@jprspereira

Thanks for writing this guide. It really gives a big picture view of what WaniKani does and does not do.

One question I have is, if I dont have access to the Reorder Script does that mean full speed becomes impossible? Or can I simply power through the vocabulary from the previous level and do all the radicals when I level up. (If this is the case, what was the largest number of lessons you had upon leveling up?)

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Iā€™m not @jprspereira, but

Yes, thatā€™s possible. Iā€™ve done it at times when I didnā€™t have access to a computer (I cannot run scripts on my phone).

That would be during the fast levels at the end. It once went all the way to something like 120, I believe. Definitely not recommended to power through that, though. If you absolutely cannot use scripts, Iā€™d say to do the fast levels in 5 days or so instead. (But you should decide for yourself once you get there, of course)

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:heart:

Appreciate it :smiling_face:

Yeah, if you canā€™t access reorder you pretty much have to deal with WKā€™s order and go through a bunch of vocab lessons until you find the radicals.

I agree with Naph. 120 seems like a good max number. However, this represents vocab from previous level + radicals from new level + 1st batch of kanji from new level + some vocab from new level (in this order - you can select this order in the WK settings). Now this means that you basically only need to go through vocab from previous level to reach the radicals, so Iā€™d say around 50 vocab lessons as a general number.

Just to clarify: I believe one can run the reorder script on firefox (Android). I had it working for me. Havenā€™t checked if it still works though, but I see no reason why it wouldnā€™t. To do this, go to my chapter about scripts and check the very last paragraph (sorry Iā€™m on my phone, canā€™t link it that easily).

Yeah, but youā€™re a legend. For someone with 0/barely any previous knowledge, going through that amount of lessons at once can be problematic imo. Heck, maximum Iā€™d do at once would be around 20.


Now the real question is why. Full speed requires quite some dedication and time. I always recommend that people prove themselves (to themselves) by being consistent with lessons until level 8-10 before deciding their pace. Things get a lot faster after the initial levels. Not to mention that 8-9 days/per is also pretty fast, and avoids a bunch of headaches for the sake of perfection :smiling_face:

EDIT:

Oh didnā€™t notice this. My bad D:::::

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Android being the operative word here. IPhone users (which includes me) are out of luck.

That sounds about right. For the fast levels, you also need to do all kanji in one go for max speed, so that means a total of ~90 lessons without reorder. Not fun.

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Thanks of the quick replies.

All answers are welcome. I agree that I would probably just do the fast levels slightly slower than max when I get there.

I do have some past knowledge so that may help but I would definitely divide up the vocab into smaller groups per day just so the reviews arenā€™t all clump together on the same day if I was using the reorder script. I donā€™t really know how it will play out when the previous levels start coming back around.

As for why, I am mainly looking to use WK as a gap filler for what I have already studied and an exposure tool for the Kanji I may not have came across that a Japanese high school student would know. (90% of Joyo Kanji according got Wkstats is pretty good to me) WK seems to be the most convenient tool to do this.

An additional question I have is what if the following happens (taken from the WK FAQ)

  1. Correct (+1 stage, SRS stage 6)
  2. Incorrect three times before getting it correct (-4 stage, SRS stage 2)
    If items from previous levels drop below guru, does it prevent levelling up of the current level?
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Nope :grin: Even items from the current level wonā€™t affect it. Letā€™s imagine that you guru 1 kanji from the current level and then it comes back to Apprentice. You still get the % of it. Once you get it over to Guru I once, then thatā€™s all you need. It wonā€™t delay your progress.

It will, definitely :ok_hand:

Seems pretty good to me. If you have time for it, then go ahead. Outside of WK, Iā€™m also splitting my vocab lessons into 2 sessions per day. Your brain gets a bit tired after x amount of new knowledge in a short period of time, after all. As an example, I find that 2 sessions of 10 lessons work much better than just 1 session with 20 lessons. Itā€™s just a matter of being available to do so :slight_smile:

Yeah, Iā€™d say that WK does a pretty good work in terms of the kanji it teaches. People usually say they wished WK would teach more but tbh, after 40 levels you get so good at kanji that learning directly through words becomes simple enough.

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Well itā€™s been about a month since I first read this guide. I just hit level 10 and hereā€™s what my level chart looks like:

Just to be clear, I was either in the midst of level 6, or was just starting level six when I read this guide, as you can see it has made a pretty big impact for me.

I would say the thing that helped me the most from the guide was understanding how to pace my learning better. While going full speed is not for everyone, it is something that I personally want to do. The guide helped me become conscious of how the level timings work, and how to leverage those to my advantage. More importantly, it taught me how to best space out my lessons within a given level so that I can still stay on pace without trying to do 100 lessons in one sitting.

Also, there are some pretty sweet scripts in this guide, in particular the timeline and reorder scripts have been amazing for me.

So, 恂悊恌ćØć†ć”ć–ć„ć¾ć—ćŸ JPR, I really appreciate that you took the time to write this all down for everyone!

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First of all, I want to congratulate you for the wonderful results! :grin::tada: Full speed isnā€™t for everyone, but youā€™ve proven that youā€™re capable of it, while still feeling more comfortable with the whole system. Full speed is a problem when itā€™s overwhelming the user, but your description of experience proves otherwise :ok_hand:

I really appreciate you for the update! :slight_smile: It encourages me to keep writing content like this.

Sorry that it took me this while to reply back :sweat_smile:

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@masterfulExit, @Fafnir57 @HelixApothecari, @Iyaonas and anyone else interested:

Iā€™ll be improving my guide in the next few days, and one of the things Iā€™d like to add is some testimonials. I think nothing can be more inspiring than seeing how others overcame their challenges with the help of the Guide. Would you (and anyone else reading this) mind if I quoted what you have written? :slight_smile:

Appreciate it :pray:

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Not at all, go for it. Iā€™m going to hit level 13 in an hour btw, thanks again! (NYE hangover and a work trip made me fall behind a bit but Iā€™m still cruising.) I was level 7 when I found your guide. Doesnā€™t feel like that long ago.

EDIT: Weird, it says Iā€™m level 10 on the forum. This is extremely false. Iā€™m 12 about to hit 13.

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Doing log out and then log in will fix your level situation :v:

Appreciate it mate! Good luck with taking care of that hangover :grin:

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   I just joined with more or less the same attack speed you have...Less Naruto, more Gintoki...     I am giving myself a year before i feel comfortable living in Japan...  Your words have only helped my drive.   Thanks and good luck to you
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Iā€™m okay with that. If I can contribute to someone elseā€™s journey, Iā€™ll gladly do so!

Iā€™m still :turtle:ing around since university is pretty stressful right now and the exam phase is coming up. But Iā€™m doing reviews every day and at least a few lessons on most days (plus the same on KameSame and Bunpro), so I shouldnā€™t be ashamed of my slow progress. Thereā€™s only so much I can stuff into my brain right nowā€¦

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Hey @ColoradoRaian! :slight_smile: Welcome to Wanikani! Ohhh, you wanna live in Japan? Or are you there already? Nevertheless, I wish you all the best in this journey of learning Japanese :grin: If you wish to (and feel comfortable to do so), you could make an Introduction post on the forums and talk a little bit more about what got you here. Iā€™m sure a lot of people will read it and relate to you :slight_smile: Maybe even giving a bit of their story as well.

Wish you all the best! :crabigator::tada:

Haha, donā€™t punish yourself for that. Whatā€™s important is knowing how much attention one should give to things. If you feel like thereā€™s more important stuff to worry about, then thatā€™s where the majority of your attention should be :slight_smile: Whatā€™s important is to keep improving. It doesnā€™t matter where we started nor where we are right now. Everyone had to go through it at some point.

Take care and good luck with dealing with the exams :muscle: Thank you once again.

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Can I give a testimony?!

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