But sometimes using your motivation at the wrong time can result in burnout. An SRS is like that for sure - if you do everything all at once at the beginning because you’re motivated, it will come back to haunt you later when you’re swamped in reviews. Sometimes the hardest part is to learn to stop studying when you most want to study.
The system isn’t trying to antagonize needlessly. There’s a very good reason for the long waiting period at the beginning. It will ultimately pace you properly for the huge workload that will come as you advance in levels, and it tests the limits of your long-term memory.
As others have said, this is a great time to focus on other aspects of your study! After all, even if you know every kanji there is to know, you will still struggle to read without a good foundation of grammar.
I hope you give WK a chance, and if you don’t like it, that’s okay, too! Good luck with your studies!
I think some of the rationale presented here should get a more prominent place on the assignment pages themselves. The FAQ answer is too short and too far away placed to properly explain this counterintuitive aspect of WaniKani.
Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear
So, you’d like the admins to change to suit this cause somehow then
I also wondered why I’d learn certain things at certain levels and felt ugh why can’t I learn this before but I could read certain street signs and news headlines at earlier levels by guessing with those few vocabs. And for those things I already know (or think I know) I just anticipate meeting it in the crabigator lands.
Be comforted but persevere
I don’t think the FAQ is too out of the way, but perhaps it would be better placed in the menu, rather than all the way at the bottom.
Out of curiosity, though, what about our answers did you feel was missing from the FAQ that helped explain better? Knowing that would probably really help the developers to update it in a helpful way if need be! Posting what I believe is the relevant FAQ section here for reference:
I just finished my lessons. Why do I have to wait?
WaniKani has a very specific order. Each item builds upon a previous item, which means in order to unlock new things you must know everything before it. Because of this, the beginning can seem pretty slow. You’re building up a foundation.
In order for the SRS to be effective, you have to wait between reviews. Our goal is to make you review something right before you forget it as this is builds a stronger memory. The first set of radicals will probably take you 2-3 days (or less) to finish if you do your reviews on time. After this, you’ll unlock kanji. Then, the kanji should take around 2-3 days to complete. This adds up to a little less than a week of study time to complete the first level.
By the time you reach Level 2 or Level 3, the speed will begin to pick up. This slow start is making sure that you’re ready for the later, more difficult material. Think of it like a filter. If you don’t have the patience to get through the slower starting levels, maybe you don’t have the patience to learn all the kanji. Language learning is very long-term, after all.
Can I go faster?
No. You’ll thank us later. If you went faster now you’d have to do 25 hours of kanji everyday and it would literally become impossible to keep up.
For instance, I would expect to get new material every time I give 90+% correct answers. You should have several layers, not just one. Yes, the items of the first layer have to be stored away and revisited for long-term memory, but why on earth do we have to make people wait for 4, 8 hrs etc. after they have answered 25 out of 26 radicals correctly (in my case). Is there some rule that your brain should only be preoccupied with 30 radicals at a time? You will certainly later be dealing with a lot more, won’t you?
Also, the interesting diagram only unlocks once you file a complaint in the Feedback section…
People, it is not the fact people are wondering that they have to wait, but they are bewildered at HOW MUCH they have to wait.
Then I guess what you’re missing is that the radicals are the foundation for what’s to come (as they’re used in mnemonics to learn the kanji) and they won’t offer the associated kanji to you until you’ve demonstrated that those radicals are seated away in your memory well (Guru stage). They try to explain this in the first paragraph of the quote that @ninjaflautist90 posted above.
I don’t think you should say ‘convince’… I can’t convince anybody about finding ‘perfect’ study materials, just encourage. lol but I’d love to hear your opinion after the free levels are over
頑張って!
The point is that the system wants you to display longer term memory on each individual item before unlocking the related content. Nothing about getting 90% accuracy on a bunch of disconnected lessons you just did proves you’ve made strong connections with each individual item.
You’re basically saying my brain is 100% occupied with 30 radicals and taking up anything beyond that at this “pre-burn” stage would lead to overload and confusion.
So? They can give me a second set of radicals to practice on, and unlock the next level for the first set once I have burned them in. I fail to grasp how that would affect learning the later levels negatively.
Because it’s going to pile up quickly… Wasn’t this discussed? Sure you might want to do 100 radicals now, but that means in a week you’ll have 200 kanji and then 500 vocab all at once.
Ah, you mean there is a certain “clock” built in…? I have so far assumed (or I may have expected) a system where you set the clock yourself, and only the progression (what you learn in what order) is set.
I’m not sure what you mean. The radicals unlock kanji and the kanji unlock vocab. If you do tons at once you will unlock tons at once when they level up. And people then come here and freak out that they can’t learn 100 words at the same time.
