Okay so I’m really new to WaniKani, and Kanji as a whole. I’m really stressed out because I have 60+ reviews and 21 lessons. Is there any way I could change the pace to be a bit slower?
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Don’t do lessons until the pace of your reviews gets down to where you want it. Then only do, say, 5 lessons a day. Increase again in a week if you feel you can handle more.
If you do lessons as soon as they become available, it is common to have between 160-350 reviews per day, depending on your level of accuracy.
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As rfindley said, yes! Your control (and your only control) is how you pace your lessons. It’s ok not to do them all at once. Plan on somewhere around 8x your average lesson speed to be how many reviews you have to do and choose early, because once all those high-stage reviews start coming in, it’s hard to slow it back down.
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Also, don’t let the lessons number stress you out. They’ll wait until you’re ready with no harm done. Reviews are different; they’re going to keep coming whether you do them or not, so you’ll get buried.
My rules are: Do all the reviews; Never do lessons if reviews is not zero; only do 20 lessons a day max.
20/day gives me 100-200 reviews a day, so if 60+ is a little more than you’re looking for, do fewer lessons than me. Hope that helps a little.
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You dont also need to do all reviews at once. You can tackle it in smaller batches throught the day. If you have 60+ reviews, you can do a batch of 15 at 1 pm, then 3 pm, 5 pm and 7 pm.
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if that stresses you out, you need to seriously pace your lessons.
i went fast at first and reached level 40 only to crumble under the workload.
i reset to level 1 and limit my lessons to 10 - 15 a day. this gives me a 2 weeks level up time and generally <100reviews a day but, but, but… it’ll go up when the burns hit.
maybe consider 5 lessons a day and see how the workload feels?
it increases a lot as you progress. of course, you get better and faster but still.
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It takes 10 min to go through.
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Ok, well, plan on it taking some amount of time. You are learning another language, after all. Nobody’s figured out how to inject it into your brain with no effort on your part. (yet)
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I know that wasn’t really the question, but perhaps you’re stressed out because you want to get everything right the first time. Don’t worry about it. The system is there to help you remember by accounting for your mistakes.
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Precisely, failing is as good as passing, because the SRS is telling you what to focus on. The only thing one have to do is the reviews, the rest will sort itself.
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That’s so cute. 
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Read my guide for WK (mainly chapters 1 to 8). Let’s just say that it will answer all your questions and much more. It gives very good information that will make you confident enough to know what this thing about learning kanji and using WK is about.
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The most important things are already said. Don’t do all lessons at once. Concentrate at the reviews. SRS is very rewarding, but can punish hard too at some times. So find your pace.
Right now I have some more than 170 lessons and unfortunately a lot of reviews that falls down to apprentice again, so I do not do lessons. Boring? Yes, of course. The new stuff is the fun stuff. But I am learning a language. When I think about it I spent 10 years at school learning English, starting at the age of 9. So why should Japanese in a mysterious way be much faster when my brain is 50+.
And if get into a pace of say, 5 lessons a day, then you get 1825 lessons on a year and you know about how many items there are to learn. So it is simple math.
And there will most probably be things that don’t stick in your brain.
But it is fun language to learn, so don’t give up. And don’t get stressed.
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60 reviews is not many…But just tackle them at 15 reviews a time, 4 times a day and boom you’re done.
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What everyone else is saying is true: You can slow down by not doing all of your lessons as soon as they become available.
That said… Even if you do new lessons at a fairly slow pace, 60 reviews is a normal amount to do in a day. There’s no getting around the fact that learning Japanese is time consuming. If you don’t have 15 minutes a day to dedicate to it I don’t know that you have enough time to make progress.
When I feel like my reviews seem like a lot, I’ll plan to only do a few. If I’m tired, or I’m not concentrating, I’ll stop there, and at least I’ve done some, which is better than none, and I’ll come back to do more later. But sometimes it’s just my executive dysfunction making it seem like a lot and making it difficult to start, and once I have, I get into the swing of it and I’ll get a good chunk of them done - depending how many I have ready, I may get through a quarter, or half, or even all of them. Sometimes when I’ve got a big pile waiting for me, I’ll wait until ~10 min before the hour to further separate the ones I complete so I don’t get them all (at least, that are at the same SRS level) all at once again
If you’re getting a lot wrong and it’s adding to your stress… I know it’s hard (I’ve always been a perfectionist afraid of failure so this is something that I’m working on too), but don’t let it get to you. If you’re getting something wrong, it’s because it’s not sticking and you need a little more help learning it, and that’s what the SRS is designed to do. Maybe you just need the bit of extra repetition, maybe you need to figure out your own mnemonic or other method to remember it (or even fall back on rote memorization if that’s what it takes for this item); it’ll take some time, but you’ll find that you start getting it right more and more often, and eventually you’ll see it and just immediately know what it is
If your current rate is overwhelming for you, then stop doing lessons at all. If you feel you can do them, then great! Do a batch or two! But if not, they’ll be there when you are ready. Find some way to whittle away at your reviews - whether it’s five minutes a few times a day that you decide you’ll sit down and do as many as you can, or doing 5 reviews every hour, or whatever it is that works for you - and eventually you’ll be getting fewer at a time because there’s more time before you get the next one. The only one who can set your pace is you
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Yeah, I’m sure 60 reviews isn’t a big deal to most people, but I’m a perfectionist and I’m very hard on myself, I just want to know all the words but I don’t
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Thank you, I feel the perfectionist thing haha, but yeah I could probably just do a little bit less and space it out more. I tend to want to get to new lessons right away, and it’s a huge obstacle for me
if you’re aiming for more accuracy, then you might want to spend more time on lessons. work those mnemonics, build up connections in your brain. i easily spend 2-3 minutes on a lesson.
that said, on WK perfectionism is your enemy. you will forget stuff, you will forget lots of stuff. you’re trying to memorize an enormous amount of stuff. when you fail a review, take a moment to figure out why you failed it (confused it with something else? forgot a rendaku? transitive vs. intransitive?). but not too long, you’ll review it again soon enough. and be prepared to fail things on purpose, because sometimes you’ll just draw a blank, and that’s okay too.
and as others said, lessons are your accelerator pedal. if you want to slow down, do fewer lessons.
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I know it’s easier said than done, but try to be a perfectionist about doing your reviews every day instead of being a perfectionist about accuracy. The most important thing is just that you get your butt in the chair and go through them every day or even multiple times a day. Getting some of them wrong is normal, expected and even good because it’s teaching the SRS system what you know and what you need to review more.
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