Some beginner questions Wanikani / Japanese learning

WaniKani
6

Regarding lessons: I personally wouldn’t do all the lessons at once. That just gives you a big spike in workload that I don’t think is sustainable long term. My lessons/reviews strategy is as follows:

The times are based on maximizing the apprentice intervals for newly learned items. A typical day would look like this:

  1. Do reviews in the morning (trying to be consistent and do my first reviews at the same time each day, let’s say 8 o’clock).
  2. After reviews, if I just leveled up, I’ll do the new radical lessons asap (use reorder script for that: [Userscript]: Reorder Ultimate 2 [newest]). The point of doing the radicals first is that it gives you a few days to cover other lessons leisurely while not worrying about going fast or not, because level up speed is gated by how fast you do the crucial items (items that unlock other items, aka radicals and kanji).
  3. If I didn’t level up and I don’t have radical lessons (I shouldn’t because I’d have already done them immediately after level up), I’ll do just 20 lessons (prioritizing kanji lessons with the reorder script). 20 lessons should be enough to cover 99% of items that unlock during a level up, considering they’ll be spread out over 8 days (duration of a level), and it should provide a more balanced workload throughout the whole level rather than doing all lessons at once. (prioritizing kanji with the reorder script because they are crucial for leveling up).
  4. I’ll do my next review session when the lessons in the morning come back for review (4 hours later), and I clear the review queue.
  5. I’ll do the 3rd and final review session of the day when the lessons from the morning come back up again (8 hours after the previous session).
  6. If after the evening session I just leveled up, I won’t do new lessons immediately (I mean you could but it messes up the routine and you only lose 12 hours which I find acceptable), but will do the radical lessons the next morning. Alternatively you can do the radical lessons then and squeeze in another session 4 hours later, so the next interval will come up right on time for the morning reviews.

And that’s it. With this schedule you’ll have 8 days level up time, which is going fast, and a pretty steady and manageable workload throughout the whole duration of the level.