Oh boy. So in my first review I started off by accidentally submitting 力 too quick as Powe instead of Power. Now it’s lagging behind the rest of my Lv1 Radical reviews by 1-2 Hours and killing my perfectionist mind.
Having the eternity of time that everyone always talks about starting off I’ve already trawled the forums and picked up a fistfull of scripts to improve quality of life here I now have the one that could have fixed it. Alas, it’s too late.
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0 lessons! It’s been months since I had 0 lessons. How I envy you!
There is a bewildering array of other other things to learn while you wait. 
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The catch is that I came in knowing the meaning of ~100 Kanji from Anki so I’m suffering through the phase of “Yes yes, I know all this. Let me get to the meat of this.” Not as bad as some of the years of experience people that take 5+ months to learn anything new, but it’s still that horrible dragging your feet feeling. My original goal was to learn 20-30 Kanji per day for the next few months and cement a base of knowledge before learning grammar, but I realized that while I knew what some of them kind of meant, I had no clue of how they were said or any context, so I think this is ultimately better, if slower for a while.
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Right, yeah - I can see how that’s a PITA. “I already know this” is definitely something WK should add, I wonder how many potential customers they’re losing because of it. They’d have to change their levelling system to something better too (or you’d have, like, 2 kanji on L2 but still have to wait a week for L3 content), but I think they should do that anyway.
I remember reading something about someone saying there should be the ability to take an entrance test so you can come in at an appropriate level consummate to your skill. I think even something that simple could help a lot. Just a quick run down the Kanji and their Radicals/Vocab and see how far you go before you start making mistakes without telling you if you’re right or wrong. Too many things start becoming mistakes or you’re taking too long to answer, backtrack a level or two and there’s your placement.
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The problem is Wanikani is structured to give you slightly more complex new stuff based off of the stuff you already learned, and it’s trickled in at a specific rate. Common words that you’d learn from another study are made of simpler kanji that you might not yet know, but Wanikani wants you to know. And maybe you learned one reading of 水 in 水曜日 but you never learned 水着. You could know words that don’t show up until the level 40s but be missing content from the 10s.
My opinion as someone that came into it with some previous study is that it is very slow in the beginning, but it’s a good opportunity to form habits. The SRS is not kind to you if you delay reviews, so figuring out a way to prioritize review time in the morning and evening is a big deal. Now I feel like I spend a couple hours a day doing Wanikani and feel guilty that I’m not getting enough study from an outside source. There’s more than enough Japanese out there to learn, and Wanikani shouldn’t be your only input.
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I think as long as they teach the radicals regardless you can probably test out of some levels. Probably only up to lv 3 or lv 5 or else it’ll be pretty unruly.
I think the issue is I’ve never liked waiting to learn. I tend to go head and shoulders into a thing struggling and fighting until I find a speed that works. It actually caused problems back in school because anything I was interested in I couldn’t help but work ahead. I have a lifestyle where I have hours upon hours of free time waiting to be filled, so waiting for the drip feed of information on a subject that I am currently very interested in is killing me.
For now I think I’ll continue picking up the daily 20-30 Kanji from the Nihongoshark Anki Kanji deck and just let Wanikani drip feed me information at their own rate for a few weeks until the pace starts to pick up in earnest. Right now I have ~14 hours to go before I can even start learning Kanji in this system and am filling the time with hiragana/katakana writing exercises for familiarization.
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If you for real don’t have anything else in your life that you would love to do and use your free time on besides studying Japanese (which sounds quite weird to me, honestly) then why don’t you study grammar or grind vocabulary for example? Maybe get a pdf of Genki and go through it, or look into Textfugu or anything. Or listen to some audio lessons. Wanikani or other mainly kanji teaching programs shouldn’t be your only method of studying anyway.
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It’s not that I don’t have other things to do, it’s just that I have about 10－15 hours a day of down time. I like to spend at least a few hours of it doing something productive rather than just playing a game or something. But you and I both had the same thought, I got my hands on some Genki textbook pdf’s and have begun working my way through Genki 1.
I really appreciate the hard work and dedication everyone has put together on the forums to identify and gather good resources on these subjects; As opposed to just the years of half-hearted junk that I’ve filtered through. It’s nice to have something tangible with a marked sense of improvement.
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