I’m currently on a free trial. Site looks great, lesson format is cool. I have no complaints aside from the wait period between lessons. Spending five days to learn 26 radicals is a bit much. Is there any way to speed it up? Maybe add a (deprecated) option to unlock lessons early? You could warn users but still let them advance. It would help out people with different schedules and/or learning preferences.
I know WK has a tried-and-true method. Wait periods are probably a godsend once you’re neck-deep in kanji. I’d just be more comfortable paying a monthly fee if I could learn at my own pace.
As Beyond_Sleepy said, you’ll have enough to do soon. Once you’ve Guru’d your first set of kanji you’ll have plenty of lessons to fill your time.
Level 1 feels rather slow, especially when you’re eager to try that new, shiny learning tool you just found. But that just shows right from the start that WaniKani is a marathon, not a sprint.
Learning simply takes time, and SRS already is a heavily optimized way to do it.
It’s there by design. It takes time to get used to it. If it wasn’t there alot of people would try to speed run, not knowing how the timings work and mess up and say it wasn’t for them.
As long as you stay consistent with your lessons, the workload gets bulky very quickly.
Also, you’re not spending 5 days to learn 26 radicals, on normal levels you do the radicals for I think 3.5? days or so. And during that time, after level 5, you usually have 100-130+ new vocabulary lessons unlocked.
So with that, you can level at a pace of 6-7 days per level at the fastest, and you have to during that time work through the 100+ vocab words from the previous level. To give you some perspective, if you do 20 lessons per day, early in the day, you can review those lessons 2-3 times in that one day I think meaning even though you’re doing 20 lessons, you’re doing 40-60+ reviews.
When you add the reviews from previous days, now you’re looking at 60-100+ reviews per day depending on their SRS stage.
That adds up to the feeling of actually making progress, and if you don’t feel like that’s enough there is a LOT to work on outside of WaniKani, such as speaking, listening, writing, and grammar. I would say there is little to no benefit to going faster with that in mind.
Well, SRS is about remembering at increasingly longer time-intervals. Rather than active study, you simply rehearse the items from time to time, each item at their own time-interval.
You don’t have to start paying until lv 4, so keep going for the time being. If you really hate not being able to control your study pace, there are other options than WK, since you will not be able to control your own study pace, beyond the number of lessons you decide to do. (most people spread them out, they don’t do them all at once when they become unlocked).
Unfortunately the answer is a hard no. Users have been asking that question for at least 10+ years and the WK team is pretty firm on the stance that the unlock intervals are part of the core functionality so they’re not adding any way to unlock lessons like that even through the API.
Thanks for the answers. I logged in at a different time today and noticed the reviews unlock quicker I thought. You could probably finish the radicals in 2-3 days as people pointed out. Still slower than I’d like but I understand it’s by design.
Moving at the fastest pace possible, about a week per level, you’re averaging about 190~ items memorized per week between radicals, kanji and vocab. That doesn’t seem too heavy for the first few levels (that’s exactly why they are free). Once you are level 6, and you’ve had a decent number of enlightened reviews pop up, you will understand why the system is set up the way it is. Everyone that doesn’t research it complains at low levels. I whined about it. You’ll have plenty to do and most likely you won’t get bored. The only people that can legit complain are people that have already studied kanji for a year, and possibly those people should have the option to mark some items as “known”, but naturally they don’t have it, because novices would abuse it and be like “Pssh, I used WK for a year and I didn’t learn s***”.
Just wait until you get to the fast levels… ~130 lessons every just under four days piles up really quickly!
I’m not quite there yet (at level 40) but I’m already sitting with 82 Lessons available and 262 Apprentice items, and it’s not slowing down for me right now…
Between 2022-05-31T00:45:00Z and 2022-05-31T15:00:00Z, that’s a difference of 140 → 333 reviews if I do nothing
just read the guide for timings so you get how to progress faster 