so I’ve been on wanikani for the past few weeks and optimistically clicking through the lessons, knowing from a different thread that it’s technically possible to get through all of it in a year in.
While in like 2 months I’ve been breezing past lessons, I’ve noticed I only moved up to level 5 and figured out something has to be up, imagine my surprise when I just discovered it’s possible to do more than 15 lessons per day : ^ )
To be fair I was getting quite bored on most days, I always wished there was more reviews and stuff to do.
What would the recommended pace be then? Without putting in a proper effort other than consistency (at least since level 4, previously I’ve skipped a few days), I’m currently on ~97% total accuracy and I can still certainly attribute a percentile of that to missclicks; I will change it to 45 starting today but I would assume more experienced learners would know of a a better way to handle it than randomly guessing a number. Thanks in advance!
This will help you better understand how WaniKani works and how to make good use of it.
Also, there’s more to Japanese than WaniKani, and more to life than studying Japanese. . So the challenge isn’t necessarily ramping up the number of lessons, but finding a nice balance of activities/resources that allows you to keep moving forward at a sustainable pace.
Doing more lessons that recommended is tempting in the first few levels, but beware of when all those lessons will come back to review all at the same time.
If you are bored one day and do 50 lessons, after the guru level that’s 50 items that will come back all together X days from now,PLUS all the other reviews you will have.
That makes it possible to get swamped by pretty much hundreds of reviews getting dumped on you in one day.
For me, what has worked fine was keeping to a limited number of apprentice items, usually 100/120.
I never got too many reviews that way and could clear them while doing my usual 15 lessons a day, sometimes 20/25 if I saw that I didn’t have many reviews scheduled in the next day. I’ve averaged around ten days/two weeks for most levels, sometimes more, sometimes less.
Doing it all in one year is mathematically possible, but it does require to pretty much adjust your schedule around Wanikani, trying to review things without mistake as soon as the items are available. There’s guides to do it on the forums.
That’s way too much stress from me, and once you get to level 30/35 you will have already learned the very important core vocabulary and kanji necessary, so you can easily “slow down” a bit and focus more on actually using the language. (Which you should be doing as much as possible anyway even before that, obviously)
From levels 1-15, I mostly monitored my apprentice items, maintaining a max. of 100. After lvl 15, the reviews start to pile up. Reduce your lessons accordingly so you can still clear your daily reviews without feeling overwhelmed.
In short, for lvls 1-15 manage your apprentice items count.
I agree with all the above - plus:
consider “ramp it up / ramp it down”: go from 15 lessons a day to 20, to 25, to 30 and keep your daily reviews at a number you’re comfortable with. If it is too many ramp down.
And doing at least reviews every day is much more important than doing a lot of lessons.
And if you’re not doing it already, you should do other Japanese study (irodori is free, satorireader is not but has free episodes).
Finally - completing 60 levels in one year is a huge commitment and not one I recommend, but you can read others’ experience and opinions in this community.
Hi and welcome!! I would say the tip from cat is really good, 100 apprentice items at least for the first 15 levels is nice, after that you might want to reduce your load. I also recommend to get started on grammar if you have not! There are loads of resources for that, also maybe start some easy comprehensible youtube videos for absolute beginners
I’ve had classes for almost like 2 years and while I kept up with and understood all grammar on them, I was always behind on vocabulary and kanji because I couldn’t force myself to do anything by myself at home. I eventually quit those altogether largely because I felt like I was too behind on vocab and kanji to continue. So now after a longer break and a trip to Japan - this is my form of catch-up for the foreseeable future.
I’ll try the apprentice items approach as y’all are suggesting, but for now I’ll probably stretch it to more than a 100 because there’s always a number of words that I already knew beforehand so they’re just there because they didn’t go through enough reviews yet
Sounds good!
When you have some prior knowledge, the early levels are not difficult (in my experience) -
1-10 Pleasant
11-20 Painful
21-30 Death
31-40 Hell
etc. etc.
kinda matched my feeling, but the first 10 levels were certainly useful and getting to the 20s was a milestone achievement.
Kanji and vocab left me illiterate but I find Wanikani to be a very good tool to learn and/or be exposed to Kanji and supporting vocabulary.
Having done 90+ in a day, a few times, when the reviews came back to bite me, and i kept getting in a loop of making mistakes because It was too many to hold at one time, it made me drop for years.
I’m not saying you can’t do it. but nothing hurt me more than having 20 words I just could not remember being bunched in with every new batch, and feeling like no progress was being made because I couldn’t get them. I have 了 in my batch (Which given it’s new placement says how long ago i started) and given it’s actually real easy, For ever i couldn’t keep りょう in my head to ever answer correctly.
That’s my personal experience with trying to rush through.
. So the challenge isn’t necessarily ramping up the number of lessons, but finding a nice balance of activities/resources that allows you to keep moving forward at a sustainable pace. 