Not sure when to continue doing lessons cause I read you should keep Guru under 100 to avoid burnout

It is under “other advanced settings” and you add it to “special button 1 behavior” or any other special button.

You can’t make WaniKani faster with scripts or apps. But you can create a more balanced workload by using certain scripts. Without them, you’d have to do most lessons as soon as you level up to go at max speed. With them you can spread the lessons over a few days.

But you don’t need to go at max speed. Since you’re already worried about burnout, I’d definitely recommend against it. But you should try doing some lessons almost every day so you keep moving forward and learning.

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100 is only a commonly used goal, btw. It works for a lot of people, but some do more or less. The important thing is to not change it radically too fast. When I restarted and reset earlier this year, I initially didn’t do anything new until I got my Apprentice under 50. Then, since I was still getting a lot of higher level reviews (that I would fail) meaning I got a lot more reviews than Apprentice would normally indicate, I progressively raised it by 10 once a week until I got it back to 100. Because of the staged nature of SRS, it takes awhile for any adjustment to be visible, so it’s best to raise or lower in stages to give yourself and the SRS time to acclimate to the new speed. Otherwise, you can get run over by the freight train of SRS.

As for keeping the number of reviews down, it depends. If you only do reviews once or twice a day, you’re going to have more reviews per session.

If, on the other hand if you do reviews as they come up like I do, I’ve found scheduling my lessons either first thing in the morning or in the evening helps to spread things out throughout the day.

This is because the App1 and App2 intervals are < 1 day, while the other intervals are all x days - 1 hr. This means that after passing App1&2, reviews will slowly drift backwards through the day (assuming you get them right, of course). If you do your lessons such that App2 is passed in the morning, you (or at least I) end up having a large spike of reviews every morning. By doing lessons either first thing in the morning (where App2 will pass sometime in the evening) or last thing at night (where App1 will be morning, and App2 afternoon), reviews get scattered throughout the day.

This may not work if you get the lower levels wrong a lot, but I’ve found it helped me a lot to avoid serious spikes in the morning, which I got a lot before I reset. Now it’s much more spread out.

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I think you should just keep going. Burnout is very subjective. Once you feel burnt out, stop doing lessons and only do reviews. You shouldn´t worry about stuff not sticking 100% in memory, because they will eventually when you start reading. Most of the stuff I´ve safely stored in my long-term memory so far is the stuff I´ve encountered while reading.

And it´s never too early to start reading. I don´t understand most of what I´m reading, but I´m constantly picking up new words, and reinforcing what I´ve been studying in wanikani. It´s painful to read at the start, but it doesn´t take long before it gets more comfortable.

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many use the number of apprentice items to judge whether they want to go faster or slower, and that works.

but you can also adjust your speed more directly by deciding how many lessons you want to do per day. if you don’t make any mistakes, each lesson comes back as a review 8 times. we have to assume that there’ll be some mistakes, so estimate that as 10 reviews. for each lesson. so if you do 5 lessons a day, you’ll get around 50 reviews a day.

at 5 lessons a day you’d get to level 60 in just under 5 years.

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what is a reset & what happens after it?

when i researched wanikani on other sites before signing up, they never mentioned the long time commitment needed to finish this app.

Resetting is when you tell WaniKani that you’re an idiot and got in over your head. More seriously, resetting lets you set your level to something lower than WK thinks you are. Everything above it goes right back in the unlearned pile and you can build from there.

In my case, I was at level 21 early last year. Then 2 things happened. I got sick. So I put myself in vacation mode, expecting to get back a few days later. But before I could, the covid lock downs started. And time went on…

10 months later, I want to get back, but there’s no way I remember anything that had gone before. And I knew if I just took myself out of vacation mode, I’d doom myself to months of frustrating reviews. If I’d not been on “vacation” all the reviews would be ready and waiting in a big, evil pile. As it was, the reviews would come up over time, over months.

I couldn’t bear that. So I went through the levels, looked for where I remembered around 75% of it, and reset to level 5.

In general, I don’t recommend resetting, but it is an option if the pressure gets to you.

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Learning a language is the long term commitment. The App is just one part of that. :wink:

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Keeping apprentice items under 100 is just a strategy that works for a lot of people. I didn’t do anything that people suggest during my first round of WaniKani. I finished level 60 in a little more than 2 years. Burning everything would have taken a lot longer but I stopped because my subscription had ended and I decided not to continue. A few months later I reset. I reset because I wanted to see how efficient I could be at WaniKani but round #2 is a lot more boring than I had anticipated and now I’m being lazy.

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