to you older users, when did the algorithms start to give you more than 1 kanji every other day? and how many kanji and vocab are you getting now, and how long did it take for you to get to that point?
i look forward to getting my hands on it, and enjoy all the features that wanikani has on offer, and make it part of my practice, but its gonna be a long while before i can use it for anything at all, and my subscription moneys just trickling down the drain and im amazed ya’ll could handle that feeling to get where you at
It is almost impossible to go as fast as WK will allow you to go starting at level 3. So approx 7-10 days.
Also you don’t have to pay until level four so…
???
If you have more questions, tons of info about exactly how WK works is in the FAQ and related documentation.
Hey! Actually, levels 1-3 are free, so you don’t need to pay.
And the work load certainly picks up, I have ~250 reviews a day at this point. I don’t remember when exactly it picked up but others will have more details for you I’m sure
If money is on your mind you should have subbed at level 4. Paying for it early doesn’t change anything from level 1-3 and it doesn’t make the kanji come faster.
I don’t know how the algorithms work but I took a break yesterday and came back today with 50+ reviews and after that 20 new lessons. That’s only level 4. I get a lot of reviews because I constantly get them wrong by the way lol
I’m 1 year in, and getting around 100 reviews a day. Around level 10 was where I had to actually slow down doing lessons, since it would have been too much workload otherwise. After that year I can definitely say I learned a lot, and got a lot closer towards understanding written Japanese. Stuff like signs, store fronts etc are easy to read now for the most part. Long texts are another story, but that’s due to me still struggling with grammar. I renewed for another year, and hope I’ll be done by this time next year.
Basically what Sandpiper and Saruko said above; you should definitely email them and see if you can get refunded on your subscription until you hit level 4. They’re very helpful.
The workload basically ramps up every time you start to move items into the next category. So if you’re doing an average of 20 lessons per day, which is a pretty reasonable pace, it’ll be (very) roughly:
100 reviews per day after two weeks
120 reviews per day after four weeks
140 reviews per day after two months
160 reviews per day after six months
Except your accuracy won’t be 100% so more than that and it is completely dependent on how many lessons you do per day.
I never felt like WaniKani was wasting my money. I think the value of WaniKani decreases as you go later on since the most common/important kanji are taught by the time you reach the lvl 30-40 range but even past that I wouldn’t consider it a waste.
Even now I’m encountering a fair bit of new kanji while reading that WaniKani teaches in the last levels. If one really wanted to save money they technically could stop around level 40 since you’re much more comfortable learning kanji at that point. I find myself learning kanji outside of WaniKani with ease, but having that extra kanji and vocab does help a lot so I’m sticking it out until the end.
Yes definitely email them as Saruko said, I’m sure you can get a refund. On another note,
if you do the first 3 levels and like it, there’s usually an end-of-the-year sale for lifetime ($200 when I bought it almost 3 years ago, not sure what it would be now). And if you have a monthly subscription when/if you switch to lifetime, it gets prorated by the amount left on your subscription. Just to keep in mind
We recommend to not purchase a subscription until you at least get to level 3 for various reasons. One so you can see if WK is a good fit for you and second they are free!
OP has purchased a subscription at level 1. I’d recommend to mail us at hello@wanikani.com to see what options we can provide to ensure you take advantage of the free levels.
If your worried about it being slow, take it from someone who just started and had a fairly similar impression. It’s gonna ramp up real fast and you might actually want to slow down depending on your outside workload.
I’ve also never thought WK was wasting my money.
But if you’re already subscribed and feel it’s going too slow, you can always go to your dashboard > click on levels > go to the next level up from where you are and start studying the next level’s items from their individual pages before you level up. That way when you actually get to that level, you can blast through those lessons and reviews without thinking and make no mistakes, because you already know them. Having a subscription allows you to kind of control your own speed like this.
That said, you probably won’t have time to do that once you get to the higher levels. You’ll be getting hundreds of reviews per day just by going at a regular pace.
Good luck!
i just bought a year subscription, figured that it was impossible for the rumored slow start to be more than a month or so long, and that the first three levels should be doable in a month
i remember seeing somewhere that it was hardlocked to at least one week per level, but it seems broken to me. 18 radical and kanji over nearly 2 months is just not right. if it -is- working right, are you then genuinely supposed to somehow slog through several months to go through the free content, then somehow want to pay to continue, and then it works after level 3? what the…
You should be seeing more than “one kanji every other day”. If you’re doing all your lessons and reviews (correctly) in a timely manner, you should see your first 50+ kanji within a week of starting. It still feels slow if a lot of those early kanji are ones you already know, but it shouldn’t be as slow as you describe.
If going as fast as possible, it should take less than / about two weeks to complete the first three levels, I believe. If it’s taken you two months and you’re still level 1, then something is very wrong.
And, as stated by several people, including a member of staff, you should email them and can probably get some kind of refund.
Two months on the first level is indeed slow. Have you Guru’d all your radicals? What about your kanji? You can check the progress of them on your WK dashboard. Generally you need to do reviews every day (multiple times a day preferably) and answer the items correctly several times in a row to reach Guru status and unlock more.
Well, WK is not supposed to take months for the first three levels. According to a certain stats site I needed about four days for level 1, six for level two and 11 for level three (and rising… ). To be fair, I already knew many of the beginner kanji, so I could rash through the first two levels. But even without any previous knowledge, it shouldn’t take you much longer. At least I think so.
and it is completely dependent on how many lessons you do per day.
). To be fair, I already knew many of the beginner kanji, so I could rash through the first two levels. But even without any previous knowledge, it shouldn’t take you much longer. At least I think so.
