Yes you should do your vocab. I would strongly advocate against reordering, unless you have a very strong and well informed reason to do so. WK is not about getting to Level 60 as fast as possible, it’s about learning and retaining the Kanji.
If you just want to learn 2000 Kanji meanings as fast as possible, use RTK. That only takes like 3 months at normal speed. Then you can still do WK later, or just learn readings/vocab as you come across them. But if you also want to learn readings from the start, you’ll need vocab to reinforce them.
If you slack on your vocab lessons, you might miss alternate readings for certain kanji. Most kanji lessons only introduce one or maybe two readings for the kanji (usually on’yomi). However, there are lots of vocab on Wanikani that use the kun’yomi readings, and the only way you’ll see those readings are if you do your vocab lessons.
One example: You learn the kanji, 面, at level 16. The vast majority of readings use the on’yomi that you learn when the kanji is introduced. However, a very common word 面白い (おもしろい) uses the kun’yomi reading for 面. If you don’t do the vocabulary lesson for 面白い, you might mistakenly pronounce it as めんしろい when you encounter the word in the wild.
I use the reorder script. My rule is that I never want vocab more than 1 level behind. So I’m currently 21, when I leveled I wrapped up the rest of the L 19 vocab while churning through the radicals for 21. I have been doing things really slow, but the reinforcement and extra readings is super important imho.
During lessons I’ve set the reorder script to go Radical > Vocab > Kanji, and levels to go ascending (eg right now it’s 8 > 9). This means I always get radicals first, but then the previous level’s remaining vocab next, with the intent to unlock kanji and vocab for my given level so they’re ready and waiting, while learning the previous level’s vocab before getting to them. Maybe that kind of order would help you too?
I find radicals make a nice candy-munch of a learning day. They’re a lot easier to remember than kanji/vocab so I use them as an interspersed reward to give myself a bit of a break while going through remaining vocab, and I like batching them.
I have been experimenting with the reorder script to reduce problems I have had with default ordering. I don’t like how bunches of related vocab gets grouped together due to guru-ing a specific kanji or because of how WK orders the vocab per level (or both). So what I’ve been doing is this:
On level up, do the radicals. These are easy enough that they really don’t feel like adding to my workload much.
Afterwards, use shuffle to mix kanji and vocab together. As long as I keep a reasonable amount of lessons in queue, this significantly reduces the number of related words getting lumped together.
To keep some semblance of forward momentum, when I do a group of lessons, I make sure there’s at least one kanji in the group. I find I need at least some sense of progress to maintain motivation. 1-2 kanji for every 5 lessons gives me that but is close enough to a 1:3 ratio that I don’t think vocab will pile up too badly. I’ll alter plans if some levels are heavy on the vocab but haven’t needed to so far.
This method allows me to continue to make forward progress without neglecting vocabulary. I figure that occasionally, just by chance, a vocab might not show up for several levels, so I might have words that are 2, 3 or even more levels behind my WK level. That might seem weird, but as long as it gets picked up eventually, I’m ok with it. And it isn’t like I don’t/won’t encounter words outside of WK that use kanji I learned a long time ago, so who cares, right?
One limitation of the method is that related vocabulary do get widely separated, and our brains really like building up patterns. It’s easier when you learn related concepts together But WK isn’t really designed to take advantage of that in the first place, so it’s not like I’m sacrificing a powerful tool or anything. And I really like that I don’t feel like I’m cheating in reviews when I get three words which all use the same kanji in a session and can’t definitively say that I ‘knew’ the second and third because I’d just seen the first (which I may or may not have gotten right) 5 minutes before.
Losing those freebies does make things harder in the individual review session. I noticed the difficulty spike right away. I think that will balance out with fewer master/enlightened items getting dropped back down in future reviews because they got a pass that was perhaps unwarranted due to cross talk shenanigans. I don’t know for certain, since I’ve only done this for ~3 levels so far, but I’m hoping that will be the case. We’ll see.
You’re probably creating extra prep work for yourself by doing all that with reorder. Your use case is very similar to my original case that I built Lesson Filter for (already linked to earlier in this thread). Obviously you can achieve the same thing with reorder, but it’s less efficient.
@sporadic I use seanblue’s script to work through lessons similar to you - each 5 lessons batch has 1 radical (if available), 1-2 kanji (if available), and the rest are vocabulary.
Actually, I have been using Lesson Filter for doing the reorder/filter as well. I just forgot which is which. I don’t even have the reorder script installed, since LF does what I need.
I think vocab is essential to learn specially that WaniKani force you to answer with specific reading in kanji entries, vocab entries allows you to learn other recordings from common words so your brain to catch the reading patterns. I think thats the goal of vocab in wanikani, considering it skips lot of common words, but point once you learn perticiar kanji, learning other vocab will be easier.
