Hiya,
I’ve been using wanikani for a few days and I’ve heard great things about it. I’ve been on the same ~25ish radicals since day 1, and I can’t access any more levels. I do reviews whenever I can but sometimes I have to wait hours to review one radical I got wrong earlier. Is this normal? I’m interested in subscribing but progress so far is kinda nonexistent.
Thanks!
I wondered this too when I was starting out — in fact, for those of us who didn’t use anki, it’s probably universal. You’ll have to review them correctly four times in a row to get them to ‘Guru’ stage, which unlocks the kanji that those radicals are a part of. The green bar will be filled at that point, and kanji lessons will be added to your queue.
I also suggest you check out the knowledgebase first for more (and probably better) answers:
by the way, the workload gets a lot heavier as time goes on so the first levels are a bit of a blessing in disguise 
Think about it like this, giving yourself more stuff to learn when you haven’t gotten a solid grip on the radicals yet, would make things really hard on you. Anyway you’re on level 1 (which I completed in 4 days) so if you just focus on what’s in front of you and get them right you’ll advance. Not sure how far your bars are progressed, but I assume they’re around 3-4. Once you get to 5 on the bar you’ve unlocked new stuff. These first few levels will feel slow, but since they’re the first levels, once you get past them you’ll feel like you’re doing too much and you’re going to stop doing all your lessons right away.
Level one is stupid slow. Like, wow. 10 radicals and a kanji then you’re done for the day.
But the point is that it is a snowball. level1 has level one cards only. Level 2 has level 1 and 2. Level 3 has level 1,2,3. Level 4 has level 1,2,3,4… And so on.
Yes. The start is slow. PAINFULLY SLOW.
It’ll pick up in a week. In two weeks you’ll be going nicely. In a month you’ll be at full speed. In a year you’ll be fighting an avalance.
I was also skeptical of WaniKani at levels 1-3 and figured I should just skip it for something free and faster. But by level 10 it get’s very fast if you want it to. Here’s what my WK homepage looks like immediately leveling up today. I complete about 200 reviews every each day.
Hey there. There are two things at work here.
Lessons build off each other. If you haven’t gotten a handle on the radicals and kanji you’ve learned so far, you’ll struggle to memorizing the radicals, kanji and vocabulary to come.
A single lesson implies adding reviews in 4 hours, 8 hours, 1 day, 2 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, and then 4 months into your future. If you were to do too many lessons too quickly, you would quickly become overwhelmed.
It feels slow now, but trust me, in time you’ll be doing over a hundred reviews in a day with so many lessons you’ll want to limit yourself on them.
Welcome to the community!
I look forward to the day when you look back to this post and wish you were back to that feeling of slowness. Hehe…
In the meantime, I hope you will hang around as this community is generally nice.
Cheers!
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