WaniKani Study Buddy Race - 2023, All Aboard!

Do it! :smile:

For me it’s not only fun but a good way to properly learn and pace myself. Now I don’t “just quickly study a few Kanji in between” to get a faster level up time :person_facepalming:

Here’s an example. On top of everything else I have going on now, after about half a year, there will be an occasional additional 50 - 100 reviews for burn items. Nothing to worry about but useful to know, when you start to wonder why you have so many reviews despite maybe not even doing that many lessons.

Ghost of SRS past coming to haunt you :ghost: :smile:

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Oh, I feel like this lot are quite a bit nicer than the first set I saw. Keep it up! :grin:

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Just failed a kanji review which delays my lvl up by 2days. It is what it is boys and girls.
Time to get through some lessons now. :face_with_monocle:

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Thank you, that’s encouraging. I did try to write a bit faster / more commanding and I guess for a good flow it’s really necessary to not draw line by line and at least radical by radical – which is tricky when you don’t know the Kanji yet :laughing:

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what do you use for stroke order?
i follow the stroke order from the script when i do lessons.

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Yes, also worshipping at the altar of Kumirei I of course use Stroke Order Diagram. Even though by now I have a pretty good intuition about it and my main mishaps with regard to stroke order are drawing particular lines the wrong way around resulting in wrong kind of curves and such.

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Hey there Manly racers! How are your studies coming along???
I recently took a couple of days off from wanikani simply because I couldn’t be bothered doing my reviews lol
So I came back refreshed and ready to get stuck into about 200 reviews. Nothing a nice cup of tea and a comfy chair couldn’t fix.
And honestly I was surprised how many little things had left my brain just because I switched off for those couple of days. Nothing TOO drastic just a few vocab readings here and there, but during that batch of reviews I became very aware of how often I use (maybe even rely on) the double check/retype script.

I’ve never used it to fix an outright mistake that I was completely wrong in, but I really started to notice how many times I’ll type in a slightly wrong answer then quickly hit delete and try again, sometimes twice.

I guess my question to you guys is what do you consider abuse when using this kind of script?

If you type a meaning or a reading in and get it wrong maybe three or four times, and you’re sitting there for five or ten minutes thinking and suddenly it comes to you and its so obvious that you can’t believe you didn’t get it right away, would you make it so that you were right? Even though it took you a while to think of the answer?
I’ve decided to turn the script of for the time being just so I’m not tempted to use it, but I know as soon as I get a stupid typo I’m going to be furious with myself lol

much love :smile:

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Getting it wrong 3 or 4 times and then taking several minutes to think is definitely abuse.
If I undo it I need to be able to give the answer right away. Also it depends, if I got it wrong because I mixed up two kanji I will think on whether or not this is something I actually have trouble discerning against or not. Lately I’ve been trying to be less lenient with myself

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Broadly speaking, abuse is when you feel like your learning is being impacted. People will draw the line in different places, but if you feel guilty consider it abuse.

Good reasons to use the script: legit typos, synonym hell, the cat just walked on your keyboard, calling it the batman radical is stupid and nobody cares, you’re sleepy and somehow typed in “nick fury” as the answer to 国宝
Questionable reasons: 里心、河豚
Bad reasons: 作用, construction industry

A popular take is to mark something wrong if you can’t recall it fast enough. Since the goal is probably to read in the future set this to around however long it would take you to get annoyed enough to pull out a dictionary in a real world context. For apprentice items I like to give longer to think through the mnemonic or try to get through tip of the tongue moments, but do what feels right to you.

Personally I’m not a fan of disabling useful tools out of fear. Committing to learning a language is a big deal, might as get over the temptation of misusing these things.

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I mean, the point of the SRS is that if you can’t remember an item you’ll get exposed to it sooner and more often so that you will remember it at some point. If it takes a couple of tries to get the right answer but you then push the item into the next higher SRS stage regardless the chances that you’ll get it right next time, after a prolonged period, will actually go down I’m pretty sure.

May I point you to this thread? :smile:

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The whole thread really motivates me! I just leveled up and was really looking forward to moving up a bit in our wiki :caught_durtling: :')
My last level took me 14 days and 17 hours to finish. But to make it to level 30 this year I would need to be a day or two faster. Do you have any tips for me? For level 4 I did 15 lessons every day and emptied my review queue about 3 times a day. My accuracy is looking like this and I don’t really feel like I could do much better than that to be honest…
grafik
I’m not very familiar with the system behind WaniKani (yet), so I’m unsure if it would make more sense to try to do more lessons (maybe 20 (instead of 15) once or twice a week) or to do more review sessions, to slightly decrease my days per level. What do you think?
(I don’t have a lot more time to invest in WaniKani, so doing all my lessons every day isn’t an option for me)

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Congrats on the level up! :slightly_smiling_face:

Right now, a pace of 15 lessons a day is really good. You’ll thank yourself later because the more lessons you do, the more your reviews pile up later. It’s a good thing you can’t do all your lessons every day because your review pile will look very scary later.

I assume when you’re doing lessons, you’re having them randomly generated? Some people like to take the max speed level up route (level up in about 7 days). In order to do this, you need to do all the radicals when they come out. This will take 3-4 days to complete, and in the meantime, you would do your kanji lessons spaced out between those days and do the remaining kanji lessons at once when the second set is released.

You don’t have to be that gung ho, but knowing prioritizing your items and pacing them out in the week (and of course, doing a bit of vocab lessons in between) can help your level up speed. But as you considered doing your reviews every day, especially once they come out (as you’ll generally make fewer mistakes the sooner you do them), can help speed things up as well.

But if you’re doing all of your vocab before your kanji items and especially before your radical items, you will inevitably take longer because passing those items are what is required to level up. The other problem is people put too much focus on leveling up that they put off their vocab lessons and they sort of pile up and don’t properly supplement the kanji learning like they’re supposed to, so just remember balance is important too.

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I think 15 lessons per day is fine! Your accuracy looks fine as well.

In order to level up fast you need to guru your kanji faster (and by extension your radicals). In that sense, vocabulary is neglectable. HOWEVER I’d highly recommend not to skip the vocab as I feel in the long run they are more valuable than the kanji themselves even.

Anyway, if you wanna speed up you could use a lesson reorder script. Once you unlock new radicals, learn them first. This might also be a good time to maybe increase the amount of lessons (if there are more than 15 radicals to learn). Once you unlock Kanji, you could focus them over Vocabulary.

Again, I’d be a bit careful not to completely neglect vocabulary - that might be hurtful in the long run. In the end level 30 by the end of this year is a nice goal, but it’s useless if you set yourself up for burnout or with a ridiculous amount of unlearned vocab.

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Thank you so much for your detailed answer!
I’ve already read about sorting your lessons somewhere in the forums, but I don’t think I completely udnerstand what those scripts do :see_no_evil: Even without a specific script, WaniKani teaches the radicals and the first kanjis of the level at the beginning and the vocabulary at the end (or doesn’t it?) How do these scripts improve this system…? :sweat_smile:

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15 lessons a day should easily let you level up a day or two faster on most levels! I do 10-13 a day, and I tend to level up every 12-15 days, depending on how many items are in a level. The early levels have a little more lessons than the others, so they’ll take you a little longer if you’re doing a set number of lessons a day, but there are plenty of quicker ones after that!

And yeah, if you really want to control your level up speed, you can try using the lesson filter script to learn the radicals first and then learn the kanji at whatever speed you want. I don’t reorder my lessons in order to level faster, but to do so more consistently, so I spread out my kanji and do 3 kanji and 9 vocab lessons a day. If you aim for roughly a 1:3 ratio of kanji to vocab (4 kanji and 12 vocab would get you there, if you want to go a little faster than me), you shouldn’t have to worry about falling behind with vocab, because there is roughly three times the amount of vocab lessons as kanji in WK.

I don’t think reordering your lessons is necessary to meet your goal, but if you like consistency and aren’t a fan of learning kanji in huge batches, it’s a great way to make your workload more predictable and even :blush:

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People use scripts to reorder their lessons for many reasons! Most people trying to go full speed use them so that they can learn the radicals and kanji as soon as they become available, then spread out the vocab lessons over several days while they’re waiting to guru the kanji. It’s a way more sustainable study schedule then trying to binge 70 lessons at the beginning of a level to get through the old level’s vocab as well as the new level’s radicals and first batch of kanji all at once.

However, there’s a danger to this: some people get too tempted by the power the script gives them, and end up skipping their vocab lessons and just learning the kanji. This is generally a bad idea because WK only teaches one or sometimes two readings with the kanji, and then teaches the rest through vocab. When people caution against reordering or talk about the dangers, this is what they’re referring to.

But trying to go fast isn’t the only reason to reorder your lessons! I am very much not trying to speedrun this, haha, and the method I mentioned in my post is something that I like to do because I don’t like learning kanji in huge batches, and I get demotivated trying to chew through a bunch of old vocab lessons at the beginning of a level before I can start learning new content. So spreading out the kanji lets me learn kanji every single day except for the last few days of a level while I’m waiting for my final kanji to guru (I let myself take it a little easier then and do just 10 vocab lessons a day until I level).

There’s a more in-depth description of using scripts and controlling your level up speed in the ultimate guide to WK, which I recommend reading if you haven’t looked at it yet :blush:

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Thank you!
I also find the vocabulary super valuable because I can use it directly in my Japanese course. So I definitely wouldn’t want to neglect them! :smiling_face:
I have the feeling that what kept me from leveling up was a handful of kanji that I got wrong very often in the reviews :') But doing all the radicals when they are available seems like a good idea to increase the speed at the beginning of the level, but to not overhelm me! Maybe I should just give it a try this level. :slight_smile:

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That makes a lot of sense - thank you! :blush:
I read the ultimate guide two month ago, so re-reading it shouldn’t hurt! I also definetly don’t want to speedrun and would be fine with not reaching a certain level this year, but setting a goal really motivated me, so I’ll stick with this idea as long as it has a positive effect and doesn’t burn me out.

Re-ordering the Kanji and Vocab lessons the way you do it, seems very smart! I tend to get a bit confused with learning 15 Kanjis at once (esp. Reading-wise) and I like to learn vocabulary, so I definitely will be trying your “method” the next days!

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Thanks to the other replies here, I think you already have a pretty good idea on how they work, but in case some more clarification is helpful… just keep in mind these important points to leveling up as quickly as possible:

  • Radicals must be done as soon as they’re available. From then on, they will move on to Guru in about 3-4 days (assuming you don’t make any mistakes) and unlock the second round of kanji.
  • The second set of kanji must be done as soon as possible. The sooner you send them to Guru, the sooner you can level up.
  • The first set of kanji released with the radicals can be done anywhere between when they’re first released until the hour your second set of kanji are released for the quickest level up.

Here’s a visual of my strategy when I think I can speed through a level (typically because I’m already familiar with some of the kanji already so it’s less overwhelming for me. Otherwise, I don’t recommend speeding through if you genuinely want to learn for the long term.)

  • Thursday 7PM - Level up and radicals become available. Use reorder script to do all the radicals + kanji and vocab to total no more than 15 lessons. (Ex: If there’s 6 radicals, I’ll do maybe 5 kanji and 4 vocab lessons.)
  • Thursday 11PM - Review to send radicals to Apprentice 2.
  • Friday 7AM - Review to send radicals to Apprentice 3. Do 10 kanji and 5 vocab lessons.
  • Saturday 6AM (I forget how many hours later but it’s approximately one day later) - Review to send radicals to Apprentice 4. Do 10 kanji and 5 vocab.
  • Sunday (any time) - Do remaining kanji from first set + vocab that adds up to 15 lessons.
  • Monday 5AM (Again, I forget the exact time, but it’s about 2 days later) - Review to send radicals to Guru, thus unlocking kanji set 2. Do all the remaining kanji lessons immediately.
  • Monday 9AM - Kanji review (Apprentice 2) + vocab lessons
  • Monday 5PM - Kanji review (Apprentice 3) + vocab lessons
  • Tuesday 4PM - Kanji review (Apprentice 4) + vocab lessons
  • Thursday 3PM - Kanji review (Guru) + vocab lessons

I didn’t list them but of course, you’re also doing reviews for the first set of kanji and the vocab too. I just wanted to illustrate the other points to show how you can level up quickly. But this is an ideal schedule that assumes: you will never make a mistake and you will always be available to do the reviews at those times. Chances are, it won’t go smoothly every time, but you can see how you can maybe speed up your progress while also dividing the lessons so they’re evenly balanced.

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Thank you so much again! Even though levling up as fast as possible isn’t an option for me right now, I think implenting some of the tactics you described into my process could give me the slight boost I need to finish the manly race to level 30 this year :muscle:
Will definitely come back in the next weeks and re-read/try out the tips all of you shared! :slightly_smiling_face:

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