Hello, I am currently on level 37, aiming to reach level 48. Despite doing Wanikani everyday, I am essentially just stuck on the same level for long periods of time (for this and the previous level). The only reason I got out of level 36 was because of order scripts to do kanji first, though that increases the number of lessons to high levels.
Number of reviews isn’t that bad (aiming to keep it below 150 per day) though I have an overwhelming number of lessons, so I am scared of doing lessons as it would cause reviews to rise to unmanageable levels. My accuracy during review session is around 80%
I also have apprentice where the number of items fluctuates. It is faster and easier for me to forget a reading for Guru+ kanji than it is for me to move an apprentice time into Guru (to have lower reviews to make room for more lessons)
If I do lessons now, reviews will rise to potentially unmanageable levels.
But because I am not doing lessons, I am essentially stuck on this level for indefinite period of time.
The only thing I can try now is to reduce apprentice items to make room for new lessons, but that task itself is taking (I guru one item, and my mistakes on guru+ items replaces it)
I’m guessing that your accuracy between lesson and guru is a bit on the low side (?) - if so, then spending more time doing the actual lessons (I always hit the ‘need more time’ button to go back over the lesson items at least once more before taking the quiz) should make a big difference.
I also use BishBashBosh to review Apprentice 1, recently failed, and really old Apprentice and Guru items, usually 3 times daily, and in the months since I started doing that, I’ve cut down my leeches by about 60%, which makes a significant improvement to my workload.
So 80% is considered to be low, right? Yeah I have been trying to reduce number of apprentices, though it usually takes time to do. And making mistakes on guru+ items doesn’t really help the issue.
Yeah I suspected that I may have to resort to self studying Wanikani reviews before doing the actual reviews itself, I will take a look at BishBashBosh, thanks for the recommendation.
Well, did you use the reorder script to level up? Based on your number of lessons, it seems like you have lessons from previous levels to do. My guess is that now you’re not changing the order of lessons and Wanikani is just giving you lessons ordered by level. I think that’s very fair, as you should avoid not learning words from previous levels.
Why would you be in a hurry to level up now? I’d say that the priority should be on learning the content that’s behind first, not on leveling up (and making your situation worse).
Wouldn’t doing 10-20 lessons a day that cause the number of reviews to go up, resulting in having to spend more time on Wanikani to finish reviews each day? I would like to do more lessons, but I already spend a good fraction of the day to do reviews and this it will become harder to balance this with real life stuff due to increased reviews.
Currently trying to prep for N2 so I am aiming for level 48. If I spend too much time on a level, I might fail to achieve that goal of being exposed and learning N2 kanji and vocabulary in time.
Kanji is a very small part of the JLPT, compared to vocabulary, grammar and reading practice in my opinion. Wanikani is also not a complete vocabulary resource. There’s so much more N2 vocab out there that is not on Wanikani (and that uses kanji you probably already know). If anything, I believe focusing on other areas might give you a higher probability of success.
Definitely, but that’s also precisely the reason why you shouldn’t focus on leveling up. That will only bring you even more lessons and therefore more reviews (and you have lessons from previous levels to catch up as well). There’s not much of a point to leveling up for the sake of learning more before the JLPT if you’re not learning by not doing the lessons
How’s your grammar and reading practice? Have you been doing any vocabulary studies outside of Wanikani?
I can understand you trying to rush levels with a reorder script for N2, but I’ve never used one and my levels are both faster than yours and I don’t have a huge pile of lessons. I’m even 0-0 right now.
The thing is that the vocab lessons reinforce the Kanji and I’ve found that doing them increases my accuracy on Kanji for Master/Enlightened significantly.
Ah that’s impressive, something I should look into. What is the highest amount of reviews you ever had when you were doing 10-20 per day and how did you handle it?
Well if that’s the goal, wanikani is the wrong tool. Cut back on WK, buy an N2 kanji book and bury your nose in paper. Books have no SRS timings, or levels built into them, you can read any chapter any time you please. You can study what you want, when you want.
I get close to 200 near the end of the week that I start a lesson on as the apprentice items get to guru and then again a week later for the next guru review.
But those aren’t too bad since they’re close to the weekend. And if I do have a lot of reviews on a particular day, I won’t do any lessons. So I’ll occasionally have a level stretch to 11-13 days or more.
How often do you do reviews and did you end up finishing the 200 reviews in one day? I feel like if I start to add more lessons each day, I will definitely have way more than 200 reviews to do for the day.
These aren’t exact times. The morning one is usually over my morning coffee. The noon one I do whenever I eat lunch. The evening one is usually done after dinner. I’ll sometimes check again later that night if I have some free time.
Any reviews that come in after the evening are done the next day. However, because I only do lessons during my morning or noon review, I usually don’t get reviews after 8pm or before 5am:
For what it’s worth, whenever I’ve taken the test (no matter the level), same general conclusions:
Where the !@#$ is all the grammar I spent time on?
Got to watch the clock on the reading portion, which is ultimately not hesitating on kanji readings for context or answers.
I’ve read several passing stories on the WK boards where people just used the WK vocab bank as a single resource…which stills sounds foreign to me (kana only or non-intuitive compound vocab?) I suspect precise and fast kanji recall must be a factor to bridge the gap for many safe assumptions if that’s the case.
Other than the small beginning kanji test portion, there is nothing really testing reading accuracy like WK (ex. correct dakuten or even knowing how to pronounce/write), the weight ultimately falls on understanding the kanji meaning for correct context. This is arguably one of the biggest contributor to leeches and it’s not even that important on JLPT. I understand this is perfectly normal for reading, not every vocab is going to be studied anyways so it’s realistic in the wild. However, this is my biggest beef with the test as input only; being a well rounded student of the language is not necessarily rewarded here.
I don’t know what you expect… if you rush it’s gonna catch up with you eventually. If you don’t plan on using the SRS properly maybe just get flash cards instead of Wanikani? Because WK will force you to burn stuff that you learn…
