Wayyy to slow

Why do you have to go here? Seriously?

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Are you doing any study outside of WK?

EDIT: Ok, let’s just suggest something extra to do that involves 0 kanji (so no WK stopping you): a deck with 4500 words in katakana. People think they don’t need to learn katakana vocab because they can read most of them, but can they recall them? They can’t. So let’s learn them \o/ They are super useful. Japanese people agree.

Sign up to Kitsun and check the community deck section. The deck is there.

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You’ll be okay. As you say, “adapt of [sic] die.” Perhaps people need to adapt to WaniKani and not the other way around, especially when they have gone out of their way to address their system in length and why they stand by it. No one is forcing anyone else to utilize it.

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@CyrusS Requesting to close. Getting arguments and off-topic.

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I definitely second this. That’s something I regret not doing earlier, studying outside of WK. Floflo, Bunpro, and Anki are also all great options. (Italki too if you’re up to it.) Same with incorporating textbooks like Genki, Tae Kim, etc. Don’t be like me and only use WK until like level 20 x’D

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I agree. However, I think people would use it on radicals, which is their prerogative but may be inappropriate if you use them for mnemonics. That would get the kanji faster if you could use it on radicals but have the problem of bypassing the premise of the lessons. Early on one should try the radicals at least to see how the product works. So the way in which content is structured and unlocked presents an issue for testing out.

I think the slowness is not really a problem in the greater scheme of things because there are other things to study. But I don’t think people’s ability to use the SRS properly would be warped by being able to mark 一 as a known kanji. (Of course, kanji unlocks are tied to radicals and levelling to a kanji threshold, so it would only really be useful if you know most of them in a level.)

The thing about the free levels though is they’re a really good way of sampling the lessons, even known material.

Generally: I think getting personal is inappropriate. And the reality is some people can go faster than WK, investing great amounts of time and effort into RtK or their own decks etc. It’s equally arrogant to think that because the design is this way for a reason, people are presumptuous to question it. WK is set at a medium for its target demographic. It is not an arbitrary medium but it still obviously can’t be ideal for everyone. And still others won’t understand. That’s okay.

In general, the pile ons in these threads are more hostile to new users than the unintuitiveness of SRS (or the lesson structure), imo. Nobody is making anyone repeat themselves to these threads. Just move on if you don’t wish to provide unpaid customer support, which is your right. Someone will explain and the discussion can be had again.

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Posting because I asked the same question (can you speed this up?) when I first started, too.

I know it feels slow in the beginning, but it’s really not if you stay on top of reviews and look at the big picture:

Started 7/04/17, reached 60 on 7/15/18. Lots of people have achieved similar times.

If you’re serious about speed it’s definitely doable.

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Yes…general vocab with Anki, sentence practice with the examples here and speaking/listening practice with YouTube and people.

Good suggestion about katakana…although I loath that system.

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Don’t forget dedicated grammar study! It can really end up a bottleneck for reading longer materials.

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The deck is also available for Anki. :man_shrugging: Though Hine added his template which makes it way more user-friendly and I asked Baggy to have a bot order all vocab in a decreasing order of frequency (On bing, cuz free). So the Kitsun’s version is actually better.

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give it time. You’ll soon feel like you are a castle under siege and it’s all you can do to keep the hordes back for another day.

On top of that: this is not a way to learn Japanese. If you think this is too slow or you finish your reviews and still have more time for Japanese, start using an actual Japanese language learning method. Get a textbook; if you have one use it in your down time. Get an exchange partner. Get a teacher (over Skype or in real life.) This service is a supplement, not a method in itself. (It’s still the single best kanji method out there)

I knew about 100 kanji before I started using this site and I was annoyed when I saw kanji I knew. But it’s useful and reinforcing, just accept it:)

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Also even in English loanwords, the pitch accent choices being so different from the English stress-accent placement can make remembering a nightmare. ボランティア sounds like a fantasy country.

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スケジュール is the worst!

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A little off topic, but how do you get the reviews timeline to show at the top?

Ultimate Timeline :smiley:

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Ah yes, my favourite loanwords are Mekeeshko (Mexico) and tekeesto (text).

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First of all, I agree with the opinion of most users: The built-in speed is well done (at least for me) and the workload will increase soon enoguh. Still, imho most of arguments I’ve read against the opportunity of customization are, well, not valid.

It is true, that the makers of WK did not randomly determined the speed. And yes, you cannot expect to master WaniKani in a month or less, but nobody wanted to do that anyway. There is absolutely no reason not to allow people to choose their own speed. A feature like that would not mean that no one would use the settings suggested by WK anymore! Besides, you could only allow user above level x to use it, to make sure that they don’t overdo it.

As I said, it’s fine for me. But there are people who maybe want to be asked their items more often. People who do not want to spend weeks with no review of an item between Master and Enlightened. The workload would increase, but as many others mentioned you can just go through less lessons, right? On the other hand there are maybe people who just need to speed through some basic kanji and vocab, for what reason ever (work, travel, etc.). And maybe there are times where you have much more time to spend on WK before going back to normal again.

The point that bugs me the most (and tbh my only personal reason) is that the system denies my autonomy. It’s like at school, as if I wouldn’t be eligible to know how I can learn in the best way. And this exactly the argument that some people here made. YES, I trust WK to have done some research on how to teach people a new language; if I could choose, I would even choose the default settings. But NO, of course I do not trust WK to know what’s best for me, as a person, as an individual!

And yes, I know, that I’m not forced to use WK. But I like WK, and I pay for WK, seriously, what’s wrong with asking for costomization? The fact that WK has so many users does not mean, that the lack of this feature does not bug anyone, but just that it’s not bugging them enough to leave (actually, a friend of mine chose Anki over WK exactly because of this). In the end, I think most of us can agree on the default setting of WK actually being really good. But still, they could be (individually) better.

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I think the largest problem is that many people, myself included, initially severely underestimate the workload that an SRS system hits you with later on if you dive deep early, and end up drowning themselves, burning out, and quitting when given full reign. I’ve done it and I’ve seen a lot of people do it, and we’ve also seen how even in this system, people use the reorder script to accidentally screw themselves.

That doesn’t instrinsically mean that people shouldn’t be able to do what they want in principle, but giving people enough rope to hang themselves with isn’t a great business model when you rely on subscriptions.

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That’s true. Other systems like anki or even memrise let you do as many as you want the frist day. Can that backfire a week later where you have so many reviews you can’t handle? Maybe but it’s normally not seen that ways

For me personally, only Level 1 was awful because it lacks vocab (as in, usually they’ll unlock when you’re level 2 anyway). I need vocab to feel like I’m concretely learning anything. Level 2 isn’t very tough either but I could actually feel like I was getting somewhere. So maybe an option to start at level 2 would be nice. If you really want to start with around 120 lessons instead of 26, why not. Apparently that’s the kind of workload you can end up with later on, so why not get used to it at the start lol.

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