Question regarding speed

No, vanilla is
Vocab from previous level → radicals → kanji → vocab from current level.

Since you just brought a bunch of kanji to guru when you leveled, the pile of vocab from the previous level can be consequent.

The reorder script just pushes them back to appear with the rest of the vocab.

I’m still not absolutely sure what exactly the script accomplishes.

Do you mean that vanilla is radical->kanji 1st half->vocab->kanji 2nd half->new vocab.

And the script just does radical->kanji 1->kanji 2->all vocab?

The reorder script has several uses, you can also reorder the reviews to have the items come in reading-meaning pairs, for example.

The default lesson sorting for WK is “level then subject”, with reordering you can change this to just “subject” (rad>kan>voc; there are actually several options to sort). So normally you have to finish all the vocabulary from the previous level. Let’s say you get 60 vocabulary items and do 10 lessons per day, the you lose 6 days without doing anything for your new level.

I think @Naphthalene’s explanation is very clear, in your example the first and second half shouldn’t appear together. You do the sorting after you finished the second half of a level, so your default queue is “previous level vocabulary > radicals > kanji first half” and you can push the vocabulary back.

He explains it very clearly, and I still don’t get it :laughing:

I don’t understand the “pushing vocabulary back” part. Isn’t it already “pushed back” - they are always after the radicals and kanji anyway?

Even with the reorder, you still have to do the vocab of the old level after you have guru-ed the kanji and unlocked the next one, so where is the difference exactly?

And also what about my previous question:

Not really.

Vanilla mode (also known as the WK system) allows you these 3 options:


You can find this here: https://www.wanikani.com/settings/app

Ascending level then subject: items from lower levels take priority. Once the lessons from these are done, you’ll get items in radicals => kanji => vocab order of your current level.
Shuffled: all your lessons get mixed (radicals/kanji/vocab). All random.
Ascending level then shuffled: items from lower levels take priority. Once the lessons from these are done, you’ll get items from your current level in a random order.

Now let’s use your level as an example.

You’ll level up to level 6 next. This means that you’ll guru’d all radicals and 90% of kanji. These last batch of kanji (from level 5) that trigger the leveling up will unlock new vocabulary (also from level 5). However, you’ll be level 6, which will unlock lvl 6 radicals, lvl 6 kanji from the 1st batch (i.e. you know all radicals already so you can learn them right away) and some lvl 6 vocabulary (i.e. you already know all kanji, so you can learn them right away).

What this means in practical terms.

Using vanilla mode: No matter which option you choose, you can’t start right away with the items from your current level only. For example, most people choose to learn all the radicals straight away after leveling up. In vanilla mode however, you’re obliged to do the lessons of the items you get first. Which means that if you wanted to learn the new radicals or kanji, the best way would be to select “Ascending level then subject” because this would allow you to get all radicals/kanji to appear in 1 row. However, this still forces you to learn all the unlocked vocabulary from the previous level, which tends to be 50 to 100 words. Is it a lot. People want flexibility, that’s what the reorder script offers.

Using the reorder script: With this script, you can select which items to learn in the lessons (current level vs previous levels & radicals vs kanji vs vocab & Group of vocab A vs group of vocab B*). This allows you to choose whatever you want to learn depending on your goals. The script also offers other cool tricks, but in order to avoid creating extra caos, I won’t mention them.

* The same thing can be used for radicals and kanji.

Not sure if that helped.

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There is no internal WK option that pushes radicals and kanji to the front under all circumstances. When you level up, you also usually unlock huge amounts of vocab from the previous level. 2 of the sorting options put this content first, and 1 randomizes everything.

So you either have to do a ton of vocab lessons from the previous level before you will see any radicals from the new level. Or you will see them come in as a random trickle.

EDIT: Reading this part of yours that I quoted again, I might be seeing your confusion. Yes, any individual vocab item always comes after the radicals and kanji that preceded it, but that’s not really what we’re talking about. The reorder script isn’t reordering the sequence of content unlocked, it’s just putting your reviews and lessons that are already in the queue in your preferred order.

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The difference is that you can manage different type of items in different ways. My explanation shows one way to do it. Radicals and kanji influence leveling up. Vocab doesn’t. Which means that:

  • By managing radicals and kanji separately, you can focus on controlling the speed you level up. Want to go faster? Want to go slower? This is where you need to move the pieces. This allows you to achieve consistency. People successful on WK have a consistent days per level. Here’s my example:

Notice the 7/days per level pattern, which the exceptions being the latter levels which can be done in 3d10. Still, you can find consistency there. Other people might level up every 10 days, others every 12 days. But it’s this consistency that managing radicals and kanji separately from vocab allows.

  • Which then leaves me with the vocab. By knowing my speed and the number of lessons I have available, I can manage how many I can do in a certain day. Maybe today I didn’t have much time to WK so I only did 10 lessons. Depending on my backlog of vocab lessons and time at current level, I can plan on how many new lessons I’ll have to do the following day. Maybe I just have to learn 20. Maybe I’ll have to compensate the previous day. Maybe it’s actually totally okay to rest. It depends.

I think now I understand better, thank you, but questions still remain:

For slower people (meaning everyone except the top single digit % speedrunners) that try to stick to a low number average lessons per day routine, won’t there arise situations where they are basically in and endless radical->kanji->radical loop, not going through the vocab (at least not all of it), which defeats the whole purpose of 2000 kanji and 6000 vocab words, and also useing the script (because at some point they will have to do only vocab in order to bring things back in balance)? Also doing things the vanilla method makes more sense from a learning perspective, breaking up the kanji+vocab part with radicals and kanji from the next lesson is not ideal learning wise I think.

And if both vanilla and reorder methods produce the same result at 60, why bother at all? Vanilla seems to safeguard you more in cases where you may not be 100% consistent/have a lot of time, and the benefit of the script seems to be again for people that have the time to figure out how to game the system in order to stay at speedrunning times.

Where is that implied?

You should always do everything, but with reorder, you aren’t slowed down at specific points by randomness.

It’s implied if people go at lower speed, isn’t it?

Again, all of you seem to assume by default speedrunning speed and consistency.

Why would people going at a lower speed not do their vocab?

I mean, there have been people who did this, but no one advocates it.

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That’s a good point. I was going to post that I might be able to do 180 items in 40 minutes on a good day, but definitely not 280. But my Japanese exposure outside Wanikani has been pretty limited the last few months, so no doubt I am having to think more.

I’m starting to understand now though how @jprspereira had time for other sources lol. Congrats on almost reaching 60! Wish I could’ve finished same time but will join next month. :slight_smile:

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Well, that can indeed happen, but no one will recommend you to do so :slight_smile:

The system still works for slower people. They just need to schedule doing the last 10% of kanji that will trigger the leveling up some days before the leveling up. For example, if you want to level up in the 12th day, you just need to do the last 10% of kanji lessons 3 to 4 days before (time it takes to go from Apprentice to Guru).

Also, I mean, there’s no limit to how slow you can go, so maybe we just have different ideas of what we mean when we say “slower people.”

I’m not speedrunning right now, in other words I’m not changing my schedule specifically for WK or anything, but because I use the reorder script, I rarely clock in at over 9 days per level, and sometimes come in below 8.

Not a perfectly “fair” comparison with a person new to WK (since I already went to level 60 once), but nothing about my current speed couldn’t be achieved by a newer person. I’d just have to allocate more time to prep, rather than now where I can allocate time to grammar and just consuming media.

Well the scenario in my head is this:

You guru the critical radicals + kanji, and get the remaining vocab + the next level radicals and kanji. Reorder script lets you do them right away, but in the time that it takes for them to get to guru, slower people may not be able to go through all remaining vocab of the previous level, so they get the next level radical + kanji (after that more vocab), and the vocab that they have to do keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Obviously no one wants that, that’s why I asked my question. Is such a scenario possible for lets say 15 items per day + reorder script? What if a person is not 100% consistent?

And above all, why bother with the script in the first place if total number of days it took you to get to 60 would be the same regardless? Getting consistent level up time, if it doesn’t correlate with the overall time, seems like “who cares” (again, if I understand correctly)?

It isn’t. Example:

You level up and you get the following lessons:

  • level 5 vocab
  • level 6 radicals
  • level 6 kanji
  • level 6 vocab.

The thing is that the lvl 6 vocab portion is smaller than the lvl 5 one. Which means that if you just follow the x items/day rule, you’ll be postponing the essential items too much. You’ll end up with only a couple items to do in the 3 to 4 following days. This extra time means that you weren’t efficient. You could have leveled up faster, but because of the “lack” of organization you didn’t. The effort would still be the very same, if not easier. Not to mention that learning 10 radicals, 10 kanji and 10 vocab is far from being the same thing. The effort you put in is quite different. This will lead you to have very easy days and very hard days. No consistency there and no flexibility to adapt to real life: not all our days are the same. Tomorrow you might get sick, but yesterday you might have felt super good because you slept enough hours. A system without the reorder script does not work in favor of this.

I explained this a few posts ago. The trigger to stop you from leveling up too fast is doing the last 10% (or more) of kanji 3 to 4 days before the planned day to level up.

Well according to @Naphthalene, it would be (total number of days to reach level 60).

Aren’t the graphs proving this as well? (Assuming they account for days in which you have less/no lessons.)

I’m still not convinced of the practical effect of all this fiddling with the script would entail in a real life situation for the non-speedrunner. You aim for a number that would give you a buffer for your inconsistency. So 15 items per day optimally may be 1.6 years, but your actual aim is for 2 (accounting for all the times you may have to miss lets say). You can also have periods where you do more lessons to even things out.

Again, the script seems to be most beneficial to the already highly consistent people, for the rest it seems it would only produce more setbacks or time wasted, for no or very little benefit in the end.

Well, I have nothing to add to the conversation then :v:

Why go that route?

I’m not saying that what you are explaining is wrong. It’s just that I have a hard time understanding it, and asking questions for clarification, which are all based on what people have said.

But the explanation was already given in my point of view :slight_smile: I’m not aware of how the calculations were made. However, the fact that if you do it the traditional way will leave you with very little to do for the last 3 or 4 days should be enough to show you that it’s not the most effective way. It will mean that a person putting the effort to level up every 9 days will end up leveling up every 12 to 13 days instead for no reason other than postponing the last 10% of kanji for too long. The time you spent on each level won’t matter because you will always have to wait those 3d10h minimum. I’d also add that the vocab you unlock right after leveling up from the current level is less than 20% of total vocab from that same level always. It’s a waste of time to postpone the last 10% of kanji (since you’d be following the normal order) if it will leave you with less lessons to learn the following days. It breaks the exact consistency you’re trying to create of x items/day + adds empty days where you’re left with just doing reviews.