My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK 📖 )

jprspereira · January 30, 2019, 11:39am

Haha, thank you so much for your kind words

I see being in Japan as exposure on steroids. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t get fit without them hehe.

Belerith · February 1, 2019, 2:56pm

Sorry about digging up this old post. Just going through…

What I do when I level away from my computer (I mis-remembered one Kanji too many just last week and leveled at 3pm at work… ) is put the order of new lessons on shuffled in the WK menu, and just re-load by going back to the menu if there’s no radical. If there is, I learn it, skip the rest, and then only answer the radical ‘review’ correctly, before backing out to re-load again. Kind of a convoluted process sometimes, but I really do not want to deal with review avalanches.

If I manage to get all but 3 of the radicals, I Ieave it and do the rest later, when I can re-order, since that is usually the cut off for the 90% needed to pass. Unless I’ve got more free time and WK was kind to me and I still have patience for that. Usually there’re more useful things to do.

Btw, @jprspereira, the number 1 thing that helped me from your guide is definitely the knowledge about the WK lvl up workings. Both the intervals, as well as the unlock order of items. Makes everything plan-able and gives me the motivation I need to actually show up regularly.

A close 2nd is the re-order script. Makes everything much less of a hassle. (Even if I’ve only used it since lvl 8 when I got a notebook. So much less of a hassle.

Thank you!

jprspereira · February 1, 2019, 4:33pm

Yeah, that’s a good way of making things work haha. A bit of work though xD Do you use Android or iOS? Because of Android, this is the method I used when I’d level up and only have access to a phone:

You surely seem to have established a very good schedule around WK. Your level doesn’t stop going

Yeah, the reorder script gives more power than I would like to (don’t get used to order your reviews by level plz), but for lessons, it’s life changing ^^

Thank you so much for coming back here and letting me (us) know of how you’re doing \o/

SoraR · February 1, 2019, 6:12pm

The lesson filter script may be something to add to the guide. It only applies to lessons and it even lets you adjust the batch size on the fly. (For example, if someone only have 3 kanji/radical left they can change the batch size and get the quiz after 3 things instead of their usual batch size)

Link: https://community.wanikani.com/t/userscript-wanikani-lesson-filter/19023?u=sorar

That was my main takeaway too. Wouldnt have started using WK without this guide.

jprspereira · February 1, 2019, 10:24pm

Ohhhh, I wasn’t aware of this! Yeah with this feature, I feel like I can completely substitute it with the reorder for the structure. Thank you so much for the rec I’ll be doing an update pretty soon, so I’ll make sure to add this suggestion

Also, thank you so much for always sharing the guide. It means a lot to me

seanblue · February 1, 2019, 10:37pm

I added this feature a few months ago for the exact reason @SoraR mentioned. It’s really handy for avoiding awkward batches of one or two items.

jprspereira · February 1, 2019, 11:16pm

Yuuup! I wish I had this in my time

Basically I have no reason not to use this one to teach schedule on the guide \o/

abdullahalt · February 15, 2019, 11:28am

Hi, I just made a script to graph the workload and here it is. after december’s reorder, a lot has changed. I noticed because in your graph lvl 20 has the most vocablary, but i was shocked to find that my vocaublary (currently lvl 20) isn’t that much.
I thought you may wanna update the one in your post with this one

neicul · February 15, 2019, 11:33am

Actually, it’s a graph which takes into account the SRS Intervals per item, rather than showing the amount of radicals/kanji/vocabulary per level (like yours does).

The idea behind the graph is to show that your review count (workload) increases tremendously due to earlier items coming back for reviews until they are burned, all the while learning new items.

Neat graph tho!

jprspereira · February 15, 2019, 11:34am

This

It is! Thanks for thinking about the Guide @abdullahalt

abdullahalt · February 15, 2019, 11:34am

oh really? that wasn’t clear to me at all. thanks for explaining it

jprspereira · February 15, 2019, 11:35am

I’ll review the text to make it clearer

abdullahalt · February 15, 2019, 11:48am

I just noticed that your graph goes beyond lvl 60, can’t believe I missed that

No I’m the one who should thank you for making the guide, I find it really useful and I saved it on my bookmarks as a reference

Loglog74 · February 15, 2019, 12:00pm

You should add some straight lines or something to guide which dot is which level
Adding SRS simulation to show actual workload on a nicer graphic would be neat too, but it’s not the easiest thing in the world

abdullahalt · February 15, 2019, 1:05pm

Yeah that’s too much work and I’m, like, super lazy

Loglog74 · February 15, 2019, 3:19pm

I get you, I did something like that in excel, but with a simulation of leveling up, how many days to do that many lessons, timing all of that (obviously with manual input lesson wise, it was long), and the amount of items in a given SRS stage day by day, all I gained was wanting to kill myself and I’m not even sure it works properly lol.

PS: OpenOffice sucks, LibreOffice best girl.

Naphthalene · February 17, 2019, 8:45am

That being said, it is still an old (and incorrect) graph. There are at least two more recent versions I am aware of. Both were made before the update and thus are also wrong.

jprspereira · February 17, 2019, 12:42pm

I knoooowwwww, but there’s no way I know how to make one I already struggle enough with messing with excel/google sheets

dasding · February 18, 2019, 10:18pm

This is now linked in a welcome email from WaniKani

Summary

こんにちは realdurtle, how goes your kanji studies?

I wanted to give you a bit of a preview of what’s to come. Especially right now, when everything is so slow, it’s nice to look ahead to see what you’ll know and when you could potentially know it.

Level 3: When you finish Level 3 (the final free level), you’ll know around 80 kanji and 200 vocabulary words. That, amazingly, is around how many kanji most beginner Japanese classes learn in a whole year. You can get there in a couple weeks if you do your Reviews as they’re available.
Level 5: 97.50% of the kanji that Japanese 1st grade elementary students need to know, and 78.48% of the JLPT N5 kanji. Think about it this way: 1st graders take a whole year to learn this many kanji. It’s possible for you to get here in a month.
Level 10: 98.73% of the JLPT N5 kanji, 75.90% of the JLPT N4 kanji, and 88.75% of the kanji that Japanese elementary school 2nd grade students have to know. You can get here in 2-3 months.
Level 15: 86.00% of the kanji Japanese 3rd grade students have to know and 67.50% of the kanji that shows up in Japanese Twitter. You can get here in 3-4 months.
Level 20: 76.00% of the kanji that appears in Japanese news websites, 74.5% of the kanji that comes up on Japanese Wikipedia, and 85.46% of the kanji that comes up on NHK Web Easy News.
Level 30: 88.83% of the JLPT3 kanji and 88.50% of the kanji that Japanese elementary school 4th graders should know.
Level 40: 83.11% of the JLPT2 kanji, 86.83% of the kanji found in Japanese books, and 90.61% of the kanji that Japanese 6th graders should know (yeah, we skipped a grade).
Level 50: 98.05% of the kanji found on Japanese news sites, 53.49% of the kanji in JLPT1, and 96.92% of the kanji found on Japanese Twitter.
Level 60: 84.78% of the kanji that Japanese 9th graders should know, 78.81% of the kanji found in JLPT 1, and 99.21% of the kanji found in Japanese books. One user got here in 368 days.
I’ll say it over and over again. To get to any of these levels is simple. Sit down. Do your Lessons. Do your Reviews. Do them even when you don’t want to, especially on your birthday. If you do that incredibly difficult-but-simple task, you’ll make constant progress.

This is the last email you’ll get from me for a while, unless you level up (then see you on Level 2! ). Keep doing your Lessons and Reviews as they become available. If you run into any trouble, be sure to check out the onboarding series in our knowledge base. It contains everything you need to complete Level 1 and get out of the boring slow zone.

If you have any other questions, we’re also here for you. Go ahead and put hello@wanikani.com in your address book and email us anytime you have trouble. Or, reply to this email! We’ll get back to you soon.

Good luck on your studies!

Love,
Koichi & the WaniKani Team

P.S. There’s a lot of really interesting stats about WaniKani over on wkstats.com. Check it out if you want to see more.

I got this with a new account i made for the B4 riddle not even ~2 days ago. I surely didn’t get that one when i created this account 3-4 weeks ago.

jprspereira · February 19, 2019, 1:18pm

OMGAADDDDDD jumps with excitement

Thank you so much for letting me know! Things are getting serious now I better give the guide a new update asap :3