ok I understand the idea behind the timing of the reviews: spacing them out etc. but I just wanted a few hours for ONE kanji that I knew and now need to wait 5 more hours. Is there any way to speed this up a little … not everyone learns at the same rate. As an academic I have learnt a number of languages. This methods is great, but the waiting time is just too long for me personally.
Also, sometimes I simply make a typing error – is there no way of getting a second chance on those ones?
Just be patient for now. Things will speed up soon and you’ll have a whole lot to manage. There’s no built-in way to get a second chance for a typing mistake. Some people install a script for that but there is a risk that you will unintentionally abuse it. I just take the typo failures as a reminder to be more careful before submitting and it gives me the opportunity to review the kanji once more.
This “waiting for too long” happens only at the very beginning.
By level 2 or 3 you’ll be drowning in reviews and by 9 feel like the world is on fire, everything is on fire, and the walls are kanji.
I’d highly recommend TsuruKame phone app so that you can do WK in down-time, while commuting or eating. It also allows you to ignore minor typos, and “cheat” if you made mistakes but actually know the right answer.
Progress in WK is exponential. It feels super-slow at first and will speed up to crazy levels soon enough. Just read the threads of people who’ve made it to level 60 to see that in action.
You are at level 1 so you have just a couple of radical/kanji/vocabulary but in a couple of level you are gonna start having a lot. Therefore I would suggest to be patient for now.
Regarding the typing error I would suggest to download this script (but do not abuse it),
To add on I’m getting about 120-180 reviews a day(115 apprentice items), and it’s a slog. So it definitely picks up. Nevermind if you miss a day, then suddenly you have 200-400 reviews.
It doesn’t really hurt you to study ahead a little while you’re waiting if you feel impatient about the learning speed, too. It might even alleviate the workload down the line if it ever becomes “too fast”.
The community is for the most part quite friendly though.
The problem is that we probably get one if not several of these threads a week, so it doesn’t really bring out the best in people who reply…
Hang in there though, it won’t be too long until you’ve got a gazillion reviews every day.
And as has been said, the way SRS works kinda means you need to start slow since, once the system gets going, at best only 10% or so of your work each day will be new material.
I’ve actually made this mistake several times with anki. I’ll add a ton of new words every day in the beginning and then lose motivation when the reviews take up so much time I don’t even have time to add new words later on.
Like you said, everyone is different but I feel it’s probably wise to save the majority from themselves in this case, and WK is a packaged and pre-made product made to fit most people, while Anki etc will give you almost complete freedom.
Waiting is part of this app, but I’d argue that the anticipation helps drive motivation.
As far as as the waiting time and the workload, today I did what I felt like what was a Lot of Lessons… and I still have 25 to go… and I already finished about 70 reviews today.
Yes, the first couple days of this app are slow, but it gets much, much more intensive… and I’m actually in some ways not looking forward to getting to the 20s and 30s.
If you do decide to wait it out a little, then you can always study other things in the meantime.
WK is primarily a Kanji learning site, it does not teach grammar, and only really touches on vocabulary. I would suggest learning a little grammar(you don’t have to do a deep dive yet if you don’t want to), or learning some auxiliary vocabulary.
Another thing: although it may have been a bit rude from @DaisukeJigen, however, saying you will avoid the community after getting one negative reply is quite the overreaction in my opinion.
As for [@DaisukeJigen]: to be honest, I am just tired of this kind of thing. People say things on line they would never say to your face. I guess my exasperation was at the whole phenomena more than this one instance. It was the one unnecessary and petite slight too many. And for some reason I did not expect it here.
I see that other members of the community better present its values than @DaisukeJigen.
The program is great and I can see its benefit for working through the kanji. So once I have completed the first few levels I will buy more: just need to decide if it is for a year or for life.
thanks again for the info… and from what others have said about how things advance this sounds like it is going to be fun … hard, but fun.
In the future please check if there isn’t already a thread on what you are asking! And if you don’t want people to be rude don’t be rude in the first place!
I know this wasn’t posted on the Feedback forum, and even when people post on the Feedback forum they often don’t look at the pinned post, but there are two things the staff recommend not making new threads about.
This topic combines them into one.
As you can see, most people do respond in a friendly manner no matter how many times the same threads show up. But we also do appreciate it when people check what’s already here.
Hey @SteveGL! Like a fair amount of other users wrote in to say…try to hang in there! It’ll definitely pick up in a few short levels! Also, typing errors are a drag but we do allow slight variations on words. If the word is short enough, you won’t be able to deviate too much, but for longer words, we’re a bit more lenient.
I haven’t made one of these posts in quite a while. Sometimes it can be a bit cathartic, but I’m not really sure if they help or hurt more.
It’s difficult because if you allow all of these types of posts, your forum ends up catering largely to new users who flood the forums with these same types of posts. If you close them all for being redundant, the forum can start to seem hostile to newer users and turn some of them away.
We’ve had discussions and discussions about the discussions, but in the end it’s never gotten us anywhere. I haven’t bothered with responding to these types of posts anymore, because I just don’t think it’s worth my time to do so.
don’t only do wk. if this site is only one of your tools, you’ll find that it will hog more and more of your study time the longer you do it, leaving less for your other activities.
I’d recommend the double check script so you can re-do typos. Also, I promise you that WK speeds up after about 5 levels, then you’ll suddenly find yourself with a ton of reviews and lessons. It really does just take a bit of patience.
What I did for the first few levels when I was bored was use Kanjigarden, another Kanji-learning app very similar to wanikani, which has a free trial of 3 weeks, and the trial lasts about as long as it takes for WK to speed up. Learn as many kanji as you want on there. By the time you get to them in wanikani, you’ll be able to breeze through them. Once the trial ran out for me, I was getting so many lessons in WK that I had no need to learn kanji anywhere else. And the kanji I learned in KG really made WK easier.
You may even like KG more since you can learn as many kanji as you want, but you’ll still have to wait in between reviews since that’s how SRS works. You won’t learn vocab on there though. I mainly just used it to keep me occupied during the first few levels of WK. You could also check out grammar resources in the meantime, or try some listening practice. It’s never too early to start with either of those things, in my opinion.