spend a little more time on the new lessons
vs skimming through them
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It gets faster: much, MUCH faster.
I would tell myself to complete wanikani as fast as possible, because now a days I just want to focus on reading and vocabulary but I can’t so much because I’m still doing wanikani when I should be done already. Plus sometimes a lot of old items come back to bite me, because they’re old, but If I finished at max speed I would not have forgotten them, and would be reinforcing them with reading.
Also never use vacation mode, you’ll dread coming back and when you do you’ll have forgotten a lot and your apprentice and guru will shoot up and you’ll never get it to go back down if you want to keep leveling up at a nice pace. I’ve tried slowing down on a level for a while just to get it back down, but it’s no use. (for me at least) Instead, just pause lessons and keep doing reviews. That way your apprentice will go way down, (when you take a super long break, you’ll probably get down to 0! ) and you shouldn’t fail your burn reviews as drastically.
Some people say to start grammar and reading earlier and don’t let wanikani override that time, but I think as long as you know basic grammar (up to N5), then it’s okay to focus on wanikani because the 1-2 years on wanikani will be over before you know it, and even if you take it slow, it seems a lot of level 60’s are still around N3 and have not been reading. So It’s best to get wanikani over with imo. But alas, I did not know this in the beginning, and I’m struggling to complete wanikani, learn grammar, read, vocab, and handle other life struggles.
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Without numbers, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on here. It looks like you are making the same amount of progress over time, just more evenly.
I believe that was the point of the post
So then what’s the point? You make the same progress either way, so neither one has a benefit over the other.
I’d tell myself to start off using my computer. When I first signed up, I was only doing lessons and reviews on my phone, which was really tedious since I hate typing on a phone keyboard and would constantly mistype things. It led to me getting things wrong that I know were right and it got so annoying that it made me not want to continue. One day I decided to try it on my computer and found it to be a much better experience. Once I started tinkering around with scripts and found out how it made the site even better, I rarely pull my phone out to do reviews anymore.
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If you can run Firefox on your phone, violent monkey works pretty well for running most scripts.
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Progress isn’t everything. Convenience also plays a part in how people like to study. Something tells me that for one reason or another, the poster finds an evenly spread workload to be more convenient, as do I along with most people.
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Tips:
If you’re not also memorizing the part of speech of each vocab word, then your grammar should be improved.
If you can’t read most of the example sentences, then your grammar should be improved.
If you take a long break from Wanikani (months long), you’ll forget a lot and have a giant discouraging backlog (e.g. 2000 reviews, 100 lessons). Daily consistency is key.
If you’re not also practicing speaking when you do your reviews, you’re probably missing out.
If you’re not writing out the kanji you learn, you’ll probably have troubles truly internalizing them.
(I’ve disobeyed all of these tips before and had to drop from level 19 back to level 10 because I didn’t truly learn those levels and eventually forgot a lot of it after year-long break.)
Bonus Advanced Tip: Learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript so that you can write your own userscripts or customize existing ones to suit your specific learning needs.
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I would go back to 1997 and tell myself “buy Apple stock” and then “oh, and when Wanikani comes out you should do it”
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I would’ve invented WaniKani myself. Muwahahhahahahaha 
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Fell into depression over a year ago and stopped doing my reviews. I would have liked to force myself up every day to do at least one bit.
Right now I’m just trying to do small 20-30 item sets every five or six hours. Otherwise I’ll burn out.
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Use a script like the reorder script and put the items ordered by level. This way, you can make sure that you’re doing the same reviews over time to consolidate them and not just doing x items so that you’ll only see them after 2 weeks just to forget them again.
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I would have used scripts earlier, paced myself a bit better on vocab lessons rather than just plowing through all of them as they unlocked, and really spent more time on the lessons so that I could focus on the differences between similar kanji. I took time off in November and December because of other projects and the holidays, so getting back into things has been incredibly hard. If I had paid better attention during my lessons, I might be having a little bit easier time now. I also think I split my focus too much at times between the various Japanese learning resources I’ve been using, and that time might have been better spent if I had used a more consistent study approach.
I was a Mudkip.
But now I like Quilava.
That’s all, go away
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I would have told myself to never start KaniWani. I used it for 2 levels, and it was a completely demotivating, and depressing experience. Power to those who it works for, but I nearly quit WK because of it, and one of those levels took me 42 freaking days! It made me want to not do new lessons, or even my reviews because of it. I started sometime in 10/2017, currently lvl 7, and I would be so much farther if I had just stuck with plain ol’ WaniKani.
Also, I would tell myself to stop being a baby, and get those lessons done. The vocab actually helps with remembering the kanji readings, not get in the way like I thought it would. Drawing things out just made me forget MORE things because I had less reinforcement, less often.
Don’t move on to the next level immediately w/o doing the vocab lessons. I have 1263 in my lesson pile (thanks also to vacation mode and skipping tons of stuff for weeks) and most of that is vocab.
I was focused on getting to the next level the fastest, so do the radicals and kanji, wham bam, off to the next level. See ya never vocab lessons!
Next thing I know 600+ lessons.
Also, try not to have any big life events or vacations in the first year, because they will stop you from WaniKani-ing. Thanks a lot wedding!
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well I just started not too long ago. I’m only half way through level 3 so I haven’t really felt like I am doing anything wrong yet! Well, maybe I should have waited to buy my membership until I reached level 4.
I see a few people say they wish they started using userscripts earlier on. Is there a forum where I can find more info the kinds of userscripst people are using?
Here’s a massive list of scripts you can check out:
The WaniKani reorder script is a popular one (allows you to reorder radicals, kanji + vocab in any order and by level, helps prioritize lessons and reviews that matter in level up time) (this can be abused though and can cause a massive backlog of vocab lessons so use wisely ^^)
Also there’s the WaniKani override script, allows you to ignore incorrect answers (useful for typos and such)
Hmm… I don’t really use scripts, but I’m sure there are a bunch of other useful ones that can make your experience on WK efficient and tailored to your liking 
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