Reasons for clearing all vocab lessons before leveling up:
- You feel anxious when you see more than 0 lessons remaining.
- You believe that WaniKani vocabulary words are the only Japanese words you’ll ever need, and thus if you learn them all well, you’ll be set. (Spoiler alert: This is false.)
Reasons against clearing all vocab lessons before leveling up:
- You want to level up faster.
- You believe that WaniKani’s leveling up is too slow, compared to how fast you want to learn kanji.
- You want to cover a certain percentage of kanji to prepare for a certain Japanese test level.
- You know how to effectively use [Userscript]: Reorder Ultimate 2 [newest]
I’m wondering how important they are in the long run for the SRS.
The SRS leveling is based on having all radicals and kanji being reviewed to the “Guru” level. See How Do I Level Up? | WaniKani Knowledge
Vocabulary review status has no effect on the SRS level.
Will slacking on my Vocab screw me over at some point or are they not really as important?
Nothing will really “screw you over”.
As long as you continue studying bit by bit, over the long run, you’ll learn more and more.
I personally decided to not clear vocab lessons before leveling up, and I’ve ended up with a pretty big backlog of both vocab reviews and vocab lessons:
This backlog doesn’t bother nor worry me because I study a lot of vocab using other apps outside of WaniKani such as https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindtwisted.kanjistudy&hl=en_US