Why won't this app just let me study?

I’d take this time to study other things like vocab or grammar. The Kanji will come fast and heavy later, so enjoy your freetime while you have it.

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I know how you feel about this.

As an example of this I will show you my progress.

Mind you I was in a similar situation… knowing a decent amount of kanji beforehand. I even had the same mentality of feeling like “this just isn’t going fast enough”. (as you can see on that 113 day gap on level 2 and 103 day gap on level 9)

Hahah, boy was I wrong. Several levels in, the reviews started to pile up.

You can think of the rudimentary levels as more of a practice. Most of it will take a little more time to get used to it. I will tell you that learning a lot of the radicals will really help you in the long run when making guessing on readings of advanced kanji that aren’t even N1. I’m about a year and halfish close to about 2 years into my study of Japanese and my knowledge of kanji has increased exponentially. I’m hovering around ~1600 known kanji (including some that aren’t on wanikani)

Now, I can’t convince you to stay and study more on wanikani. Ultimately, it will be up to you. All I can say is that I understand but give it some time. Not all the results are going to come in quick. It’s like going to the gym. We can’t expect to come in and start at the hardest setting. Those gains will come in over time. Trust me.

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About 1 kanji a day, not bad but that can easily be doubled, tripled, quadrupled etc. with consistent study here. I’d say just accept the first levels will be slow, and in another years time you might know ~1000 kanji :smiley:

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300 kanji is like what 9 levels? Not to mention it’s likely the kanji you see in the first 9 levels are not necessarily all the ones you already know. You can easily get those levels done quickly, if you know the kanji like you say you do, extra review doesn’t hurt.

Anyway, WaniKani technically does allow you freedom to an extent, you can easily do 20 lessons a day without ever seeing your lessons hit the 0 number because they just keep coming. You can do more if you want, but trust me, there’s no reason to do so.

WK is a program that offers invaluable structure to people new to the language and learning kanji. You know 300 kanji in a year which isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, but if you keep that pace, versus what you could achieve with just sticking with WK a bit longer, you could learn significantly more.

I’m only saying this because you feel like WaniKani’s speed is an issue, so I think to a certain degree you are a bit concerned with speed. Currently, I know well over 1600 kanji and I’ve been on WK for a bit over a year and a half, if you really want to, you can easily beat that speed though.

Ultimately though, it does depend on your goals, if you truly cannot be asked to sit through these first few levels, then by all means use a different resource. Though usually I’d suggest you could use this time of slow WaniKani to get ahead in your grammar studies or something.

WaniKani offers it’s entire database of kanji pages to you to free, you are only paying for the SRS, if you don’t want it, don’t force yourself. Good luck on your studies and I hope you can find something that works for you!

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Based on your information we seem to have a similar background in terms of Kanji knowledge because I knew around 300 of them (while being quite rusty regading 50% of them) before starting Wanikani.

Now roughly two and a half months have passed with me going full speed on the first 10 levels, and I (technically) (re-)learned 398 Kanji by now – I literally just counted them. Even though it may sound like I ‘only’ learned 100 new Kanji, that is not the case here. Out of the ones Wanikani teaches by this point I’ve only known around 60% in advance, meaning that I have still acquired quite a bit of new Kanji (around 160) while simultaneously solidifying my knowledge on the ones I knew.

Just wanted to add my two cents because of our similar situation, but at the end of the day it is your decision if you wish to commit to Wanikani’s way of scheduling and teaching Kanji. Whatever your decision may be, I wish you godspeed for your further Japanese studies.

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You should really give it a go and get through the first few levels, I’m sure WK can offer what you’re looking for.
I’ve recently restarted from 0 after reaching level 20ish a couple years ago. I am pacing myself and ENJOYING those first few levels.

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Only a tiny percentage of users maintain the maximum possible speed, which will result in covering more than 2000 kanji in less than a year.

If that’s too slow, then yes, another resource would be better. Tell us how it goes, I’m sure people would be interested to know what you settle on and how many kanji you get to in that stretch.

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I would like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but too many give up early after being extremely eager at the start, but then give up a bit in. People really underestimate the accumulative workload.

The more important question that beginners needs to ask is will I be able, in my most darkest times, be able to handle the workload? The answer is most likely no.

But I would almost guarantee that OP wouldn’t be able to hit the joyo kanji in a year even if he/she wanted to. Even if he/she would work on it exclusively. Would like to be proven wrong, but wouldn’t really bet on it.

(Not really disagreeing with your post, just expanding and adding my thoughts on it).

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Kanji is just one of many things you need to learn for Japanese.

Start grammar or learn a bunch of words. 1 year to learn kanji at breakneck speed is
definitely not slow. I think Japanese people take 9 years or so to do that much…

I learned 300 kanji in around 2 months using Wanikani, there’s really no more efficient way that I know of. The dictated pace isn’t really a problem because the workload gets intense enough that you’re not gonna be able to outpace it without making it a fulltime job

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I don’t know if you’re still around after these couple of months. But, something that wasn’t addressed directly in all of these replies is this:

Yes, the first few levels are very much dictated by WaniKani’s pace. But, because of the significant increase in workload as you start to move into levels in the teens and later, you more or less get to dictate your own pace. Specifically, you do this by adjusting the number of lessons done per day.

Yes, I’m at Level 8, but that’s because I went to fast and had to reset around the late teens, maybe early 20’s, because I didn’t realize how fast it would get with the pace I chose. I was leveling up around every 7 to 8 days. And, I chose that pace for nearly the same reasons you’ve mentioned–namely, having a certain amount of prior knowledge. (I knew around 100 kanji, and I also felt like the first levels were going much too slow.)

I would suggest giving it at least until Lv 8 before deciding whether it will actually be too slow for you. It might be a lot faster than you think. Another analogy might be to compare the first few levels to “cake” in a popular meme, since they are a piece of cake. But, the cake is a lie.)

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