Should you do all lessons at once?

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen more than a hundred lessons yet. I suppose it’s possible if you’re abusing the reorder script, but I think normally the level-up gates prevent that.

To the idea though, it is possible to sit there and do all hundred lessons in one sitting (depending on how much time you’ve got.) Now you might say, sure, but your retention would be terrible. It would, but even if you fail 80% of them at the 4-hour review, and even keep failing some of them over and over, you’re still ahead as long as you ultimately do learn them no slower than you would have doing 20 per day.

The main drawback of learning them in big batches is, your daily review load* is also going to come in big waves later. If you like a steady review stream, doing them evenly day-by-day makes more sense.

I do as many as I feel like doing. Sometimes that’s more, sometimes that’s less, sometimes it’s all of them. My only real rule is “no lessons if there are reviews waiting.” Reviews has to be zero before I do lessons.

*Not average review load, since your average lesson rate is still gated by your level-up speed. But the day-to-day deviation could be in the hundreds.

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The amount of time required to learn a language is far greater than the amount of time required to do all lessons asap and do all reviews at least once a day. Of course, life happens. And that is exactly why you should do all lessons asap and never use “vacation mode” or reset to a lower level. If you are too tired to do lessons, whatever, do them latter. If you can’t get to your reviews today, or this week, whatever, do them when you can. Life is already going to pace you. You don’t have to pace yourself.

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I don’t do all lessons at once. I don’t want to do enough just to level up, but to learn the vocabulary too. I pace myself so I can try to retain what I’m learning. If I do too much at once, things don’t go well.
All depends on what you want to get out of this resource.

If that works for you, fair enough. Different pacing strategies for different people and all that. :slight_smile: I’m sure it will help OP to hear both perspectives. I can say that I’ve done both at different points since I started, and while I now prefer pacing myself to maintain my sanity, I can understand the appeal of your approach. It did work great for me at lower levels. But I also know myself well enough to know that I will get incredibly anxious if I ever reach a point where I can’t keep my review pile at 0. The best way for me to do that right now is to pace my lessons, and plan ahead, especially since I’m trying to include more time for reading.

Also, if I came off as a little too defensive, I apologize for that. I felt like your previous post seemed, intended or not, overly dismissive of those of us who would prefer to pace ourselves and maintain a consistent routine over the long term. We’re all here to learn Japanese, and what works for one person may not for another. So agree to disagree on this particular point, but we can still be friends, right?

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After reading quite a few threads on this similar sort of topic, it sometimes comes across that there is a right or a wrong way to use WK, and I would argue that this is a purely subjective argument. WK should not be the only tool you use to learn Japanese, which is why I don’t personally agree with the need to strictly complete all lessons once they appear. However, to maximize the system and the benefits of the SRS system you should maintain your reviews. And, obviously you need to complete lessons to have things to review. But if you poke around the community, there are people who have both zipped through WK and others who have taken their time. Both reach the finish line. There’s no shame in either path, and there are plenty of people who will cheer you on regardless.

On the days lessons don’t happen, there’s a world of other Japanese material out there that you can learn from. Again, if you look around the community people are doing so many different things. Craft whatever experience you want- Team Go Fast, Team Go Slow, Team Just Right. This is a marathon, not a sprint!

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And keeping in mind that you’re signing yourself up for not just 400 reviews in the next couple of days (Edit: ON TOP of the incoming guru/master/enlightened reviews) but many more than that, counting failures. I sometimes do that, but it’s not for everyone.

You seem to be discounting the idea that people can burn themselves out. If you get so overwhelmed with reviews that you lose all motivation to continue, then it doesn’t really matter. You can overdo WaniKani lessons, just like you can overdo other things.

For others, max pace and getting up in the middle of the night might be doable. That’s cool for them.

There’s no reason to shame people for being at a different pace. Or for resetting a bit because they’d rather take things step by step than in a 3000 review tsunami.

And, let’s keep in mind… you don’t even have to do all lessons at once to maintain a max pace. It’s an even more extreme level of dedication than just going at max pace. All you achieve by doing them all at once is that they reappear in huge blobs all at the same time.

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You’ll see what works for you as you continue. If you try the method of 5-at-a-time, I think you’ll find that it really is not necessary. I personally think taking that much time on items would be counterproductive. For one thing, it’ll take you a long time to get through vocabulary items, which really reinforce the readings imo. A more common method is 20 lessons a day.
I often do all of mine in one day, although I think it’s too boring to do 50+ lessons at once. The problem with this is that you get huge amounts of reviews at once. I’m not really bothered by this, but some people are. You can take it slow and adjust as needed. But I think doing just 5 at a time is overthinking it.

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I was hoping someone did the math! :smile:

Do them all as soon as you are conveniently able and then let the SRS work out the kinks.

Gotta grip it to rip it, cuz once you are in deep enough to know the answer, the question is irrelevant.

Hi, longtime user here. Been away from WK for a while but I really got good mileage from it back when I was an active user. To echo what the upper level users here have said, In the early levels you can go full blast without any real consequences, but once you get into the late teens / early twenties you’ll find that trying to do them all in once sitting can be quite the effort. This is your warning sign. If you smash them out anyway, what you’ll find yourself up against is a flood of all your new items, plus un-burned items from previous levels demanding 1.5 hour long review sessions. This often crushes users around the level 30 mark. I used to dedicate 3 - 4 hours on weekdays to studying Japanese (Kanji, Grammar, and Conversation) in addition to 6 - 8 hours on Saturdays. This got me to around N3 level in about a year. Be prepared to invest that level of time if you actually want to do more than WK review sessions every day.

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I’m not using any scripts.

I get to over a hundred when I haven’t gone through all of the vocabulary lessons of one level but I’ve done enough kanji and radical reviews to get to the next level. It’s not a matter of going too fast, it’s actually because I’ve been going too slow. If I don’t go picking up the lessons faster than I’m doing the reviews they start piling up. If I had around 50 vocabulary lessons left and suddenly got up to the next level another 60 lessons are dumped on top of that.

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