New People Questions! ~~~<3 [Lost?! Confused?! We're here to help!]

Try to focus on what the mnemonic is actually trying to emphasise rather than the specific word used. English words are at best a rough approximation for Japanese pronunciations, so remember that you’re only using it as a temporary crutch to remember the Japanese sound of the word. You’ll notice that it’s written as swing, so it’s emphasising the “swi” part of the word.

寸, which is taught at level 44 and read as すん, uses “sun” as a mnemonic, which I find rather inexplicable. I would have expected maybe “soon”, though even that’s not a terribly close approximation.

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Getting it wrong a few times until you remember. :grin:

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What are the qualifications for recent mistake items and recent lessons?

Like obviously when you just fail, it will be added to the extra study for mistakes (probably?) But when does it get taken out? Is there a time limit, or the next time you get it right in your review?

Same thing for recent lessons, when is it not considered recent anymore?

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If I remember correctly:

Recent mistakes is all mistakes since 24hrs before your last review. So, they’ll stick around for at least 24hrs. But if you need more time than that, just don’t start a new Review session until you’re done with your Recent Mistakes.

Recent Lessons is anything that hasn’t reached Guru at least once. (If it reaches Guru but then falls back down to Apprentice, it won’t show up in Recent Lessons again)

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This is one of the times when you need to read the Latin alphabet as it was supposed to. It happens sometimes

This is an example of how I remember water. When you are thirsty, you don’t just sip water; you gulp it or take a swig of water (すいg of 水).

Here’s another for 正…Don’t just せい you are CORRECT しょうme.

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みなさんこんにちは!
Hi, everyone! I’m new here, and have a quick question.

I just started WaniKani last week and am enjoying it so far. I already know a fair few kanji, maybe enough to just barely scrape my way through the N4, though I know nothing about radicals, hence why I’m fine starting from scratch here.

I want to take the JLPT N3 next year, about 14 months from this post. This would be about level 35-ish if the intro email was correct, like 700-ish kanji? I saw the guide about level 60 in a year; I’m not that ambitious. But I want to know if level 35 is possible in a year and change in under an hour a day and taking weekends off. And I just want to ask if my goal for WaniKani is realistic.

I currently have a nearly 5-year streak in Duolingo, something I’m very proud of, and the primary factor I credit to that is the app’s ability to take weekends off. I know WK stresses “do it every single day even on your birthday and Christmas”, but burnout is a very real thing; there’s a reason we got weekends off in school! So I feel very strongly that I will need days off to relax my brain. (Note: I understand I’ll have to manually activate and deactivate Vacation Mode each weekend to keep this from messing with the SRS in WK.) I’m going to be doing that no matter what, because I know who I am as a person - if I get burned out, I will automatically fail. I also work long days 5 days a week, so I want to keep my actual practice times from getting overwhelming; I keep seeing people talk about 3-4 hours a day, and if that were the case for me, I could do literally nothing other than WK, work, and sleep.

But as long as I can take a breather when needed and keep the time spent reasonable, I can do it. So I want to keep my workload within my limits, but I’d like to ask some opinions on whether that 700-ish kanji will be attainable in 14 months under my conditions (averaging out to roughly 2-3 kanji a day for roughly 280 active days). Thoughts? Thanks in advance!

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I don’t do WK on weekends. I was on vacation last week and didn’t do it. I don’t turn on vacation mode. The reviews pile up but I can knock it out in an hour.

The fastest you can level up is in 7 days due to the SRS interval. So if you pause for 2 days a week, to reach 7 * 35 = 245 days of activity, you will need minimum 49 weeks (245 / 5). A year is 52 weeks. So in theory it’s doable, the rest is up to you :slight_smile: maybe somebody with a higher level will have a good insight!

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It should be achievable. I think the only piece of advice I would give is to only do lessons on Mon - Wed so that you clear out the apprentice 1-4 queue by Friday.

No matter how you go about it, your Monday is going you be stacked for a while since you’re skipping two days but as long as you keep up you’ll be fine.

Would you be able to do reviews throughout the day? Or are you only able to do reviews once a day?

The reason I ask is because to make things as efficient as possible you would want hit those 4 hour and 8 hour intervals.

I personally would have had a hard time with WK if I didn’t have my little breaks at work. I filled the entire 10 minute breaks with WK reviews.

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These numbers aren’t quite jiving. There are actually a total of about 1200 kanji taught from level 1 to 35. The reason for the difference is there are N2 and N1 kanji (about 500) being taught in those 35 levels as well. You should take a look at WKstats to see how things are distributed regarding JLPT.

To get to level 35 with your time limit and weekend restrictions, you would need to study 5 to 7 kanji per day and about 10-17 vocab per day. This would level you up every 8 to 9 working days. You would eventually have about 150 reviews per day (maybe more depending on your accuracy).

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Sounds like general consensus is that it’s doable! Thanks everyone

For context, my “level 35” goal was set by an introductory email from WK that very roughly equated 100% N3 completion at a vague point between level 30 and 40. I guess WK introduces kanji by Japanese school level and not JLPT or something like that? At any rate, there’s no harm at all in learning more than I need to, as long as I also learn the stuff I actually need then I’ll be happy for any added bonus.

Although, the WKstats for the kanji distrbution seems to show nearly all of the JLPT kanji in green for “not on WK”, which is distinct from just “locked”. What gives with that? Are there seriously only like 50 JLPT kanji in the entire WK course or does WKstats have something screwy going on with its sorting? Or is it something to do with my still being a free account? (I’m going to wait until I finish Level 3 to buy in.)

Yeah, sorry I forgot WKstats won’t be useful unless you subscribe to WK. Once you do, it’s a pretty handy site to reference.

Good luck with your future studies!

Random Question…since there are so many threads on here… I’m afraid some of the ones I am truly interested in and would like to frequent or check in on will be either forgotten or misplaced. I do know of the bookmark function, and I do use that…but is there a way to pin particular threads to your Community home screen? That would be ideal for me!! Thanks Everyone.

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It’s possible to pin bookmarks in the bookmarks tab, but I don’t think there’s a function to locally pin threads to one’s community home screen.

One solution could be to set notifications to “watching” so you get notified when there’s a new reply.

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(Btw, do you happen to be like me who has like 300+ posts bookmarked? :caught_durtling: )

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…not that many…but they’re starting to add up, hence my question!! :smiley:

Thanks for the advice Redglare.

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Is it possible to sort by new posts on the forum? Whenever I sort by new it gives me new comments which is not what I want.

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I think the closest you’ll get is https://community.wanikani.com/new, which just shows you the new threads from the last few days, and only ones you haven’t seen yet. The new threads will still be sorted by most recent ‘post’ activity (i.e. what you’re calling ‘new comments’), but it only shows threads you haven’t seen yet.

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At what point should you actually start to learn grammar and vocab? I’m only on level 2 but I’m not finding that the vocab is really sticking in my brain.