I honestly have no idea how some of you manage to finish WaniKani in 1-2 years.
I feel like I’m going slow by doing around 15 lessons a day, ignoring weekends to keep my review queue somewhat managable.
But even then, it’s taking up so much time to go through them all and I feel like I’m probably gonna burn out eventually, as has been the case in the past. I have about 90% review accuracy, so I think the review queue is already as empty as can be, but it’s still overwhelming.
Maybe I just zone out too much during reviews, IDK, but it’s pretty frustrating since I hardly have time for anything else in my free time; especially if I’m also supposed to immerse myself in Japanese outside of WK as most people here recommend.
I don’t know what your schedule is like but if you tend to already balance a few hobbies like gaming or movies or sports or anything, then laying out priorities is a good way of seeing if you want to swap things around or reprioritize.
Other than that for me just not thinking too hard about doing my reviews was what clicked. I just make sure I’m keeping up on wanikani and then get back to my other tasks for the day, regardless of if those involve japanese or not. Doing jp study basically as a chore like laundry, showering, or making lunch makes it click (for me) whether or not I’m close or far from the goal.
for context also on my amount of free time, I generally speaking work most days of the week with a part time variable schedule, so if you’re working full time with a significant commute or something along those lines, I’m sure time gets harder to manage. just fit what you can i think and itll fall into place
Accuracy is a big one. I would really take my time during my lessons and visualize the mnemonic and actually think about it. Getting it wrong in the lesson recap reviews was absolutely unacceptable to me and I did batches of 10. I made sure to do my 4 and 8 hour reviews right as they popped up and getting them wrong was also unacceptable. I made sure to time my lessons so that I could do those right as they came up and also made sure that I knew the items well enough during my lesson to where I would remember it 12 hours later. All that really helped my accuracy/retention and thus review speed.
I also used a review ordering script to order my vocab/Kanji meanings and readings so they were back to back. That way I recognize a word and just type it’s reading and meaning back to back. Also had lightning mode which made it immediately go to the next review when I got it right.
All that plus typically I wouldn’t listen to music or anything if I was crunched for time. Just the reviews. All that culminated to me being able to do 100 review items in ~17 minutes on average.
Keeping endurance, like for exactly 15 min, and then hit wrap-up. Repeat several times per day if necessary. This isn’t speed-up, but only that you would concede to the time period.
Ordering by level or something would reduce piling back up even without clearing.
Doing 200, not to mention 400, would be tiring. And 200 everyday, you guess? (And yeah, I’ve done 30-45 min sometimes.)
That’s good advice. I always sort my reviews by SRS level so that I always prioritize “fresh” items over long term reviews. Partly because those are the items that matter for leveling up, partly because pushing back enlightened reviews by a day or two is insignificant when the SRS interval is measured in months but it’s more troublesome for apprentice items.
But also the other commenters have a point when they say that by level 38 WaniKani has already exhausted much of its utility. It’s diminishing returns from now on.
I wonder if the 2-year claim is the theoretical minimum time, based on doing your reviews right when they unlkock, doing all available lessons a day, and making as few mistakes as possible. 60 levels in 2 years is just under 13 days a level… Currently, I’m on my 3rd reset (max I ever reached was 10), and I’m averaging 15 days a level… Although part of that is because I’m limiting myself to 15 lessons a day. Once I reach levels I’m much less familiar with, I figure that would and 2-3 days to my average.
For me, the thing that made the biggest difference was doing Self-Study on my Apprentice 1 (and sometimes Apprentice 2) items until I could recite them without hesitation. Your review sessions will go much faster after that. The second biggest difference was when I started mentally reciting reading-then-meaning every time an item came up, because nearly half of your brain’s neurons are related to sequence, so doing a consistent sequence helps a lot when you are trying to reinforce your learning.
Some people prefer meaning-then-reading instead of reading-then-meaning. Both are good, but I personally prefer reading-then-meaning because it helps you think of the word first in its Japanese pronunciation, so you can stop translating in your head sooner… but try each way for a while to see which one works better for you, then stick with it.
Also, doing back-to-back reviews (reading-then-meaning) helped cut my review session time in half. I’m not sure if any scripts support that anymore, though. If I were to restart Wanikani, that would be the first script I would fix. The only down side that a few people reported was that they felt like they were getting exposed to their items half as often. Others had no problem with that. For me, I suspect doing the extra Apprentice 1 study eliminated that as a potential issue.
Everyone has different time constraints due to their responsibilities and priorities.
If I’d been able to organize my life entirely around WaniKani I could have finished in about a year – or two, if one other thing had required my attention (e.g. studying something else, pursuing a hobby, or working a job with flexible hours and downtime). But it takes longer when there’s less time and attention to dedicate to doing lessons and reviews in a timely fashion. That’s going to be the limiting factor for nearly everyone.
Everything has a cost. If you prioritize earning a living, spending time with family, and/or other learning or hobbies over WaniKani, there’s no shame in that.
Max speed is actually just under one year if you always do lessons as soon as they unlock and never fail enough radical/kanji to delay a level up. A handful of people have done it (or very close to it) but it’s just an absurd pace to set of you’re not in looking for this specific challenge.
When I’m in good mood I put on headphones with house music, take a sip of Matcha tea, crack my fingers and do 200+ reviews in 1 hour.
If I’m disturbed, tired and my brain zones out, I still do the 200 reviews, but it can take even 3 hours.
So yeah, try to be in a good environment where you can focus. And get the undo button… that way you won’t doubt and overthink your answers before submitting. Just don’t abuse it
Also I noticed you’re level 38? Time to start using the language! Read and note down frequent words and kanji from levels ahead!
I installed a userscript that allows me to undo wrong answers; I think that’s gonna be a useful one in keeping up the pace.
I feel a bit like a cheater, but I think that’s fine. No more annoyances of failing reviews for stupid reasons because WK doesn’t accept a synonym, I made a typo in the reading, etc… Helps keep the review queue smaller.
I’m not sure if I should use it to quickly try an answer instead of thinking about it for long… Usually I know the answer but I have to think a couple of minutes. I guess now I could just try something, and correct it if I was sure I would’ve known the answer if I had given it some thought – but I’ll hold off on that for now because I’m not sure if that would impact my learning.
