I keep on reading that the WK reviews get pretty intense in the later levels… And I’ve seen some crazy review pile up pictures on reddit (actual nightmare fuel )
As of now, I have been getting through all the lessons and reviews as soon as they’re up and available.
I average 100-150 reviews a day and I get them done in just under 30 mins or so of speed typing LOL.
My question is, at the current pace I’m going, will WK give me a ridiculous number of reviews in the later levels? So much so that I would have to slow down and try to find another pace that is more doable…
Any of your experiences are more than welcome in the comments I love reading about other fellow WK user’s take on this journey!
checking my workloadgraph, level 21 was the hardest for me, many words I didnt even hear before.
as I got used to seeing now words I haven’t encountered before, it is like a breeze now. I know what to expect now. No problem.
have you checked wkstats to see your accuracy?
I keep my apprentice level below 90, and I only do lessons when that number is below 90. Otherwise I pass days without any lesson and only doing ~170 daily reviews (I do one batch at noon and the final at night).
I started using WK after many failed years at attempting other methods of learning kanji like college courses, Anki, and James Heisig’s RTK.
So, I use a script that allows me to re-attempt a review if I mess up the spelling from what I know of the kanji to what WK says the correct answer is.
I expect the next few levels to be easy to me just because I have a little exposure to reading Japanese but 100% when i get to words that are new I will be shocked at the change in difficulty. I’m just kinda scared and trying to prep myself in advance haha
Content-wise, the difficulty doesn’t change that much. The kanji get more complicated as you go, but they’re made up of components you learn at earlier levels, so it basically balances out. (in fact, I think levels 1 and 2 are the hardest because of all the weird number/counter readings, but I don’t think that’s a very common opinion)
The total workload will increase though. You probably aren’t doing any Master → Enlightened or Enlightened → Burned reviews yet. Once those show up, you’ll be doing something like 200+ reviews a day if you maintain your current pace. If the workload is starting to feel overwhelming, you should space out your new lessons more.
[Edit] Though 10-ish days per level isn’t unreasonably fast or anything. Most people with huge review counts are either going at max speed (under 7 days per level), or took some time off and let the reviews accumulate.
I’m not sure how true this is but I heard WK gets easier in the later levels (like 40+?) maybe someone could corroborate, I’m only 26 so I don’t know. From where you’re at it does get more difficult, or rather just more time consuming is more accurate. I do all my lessons ASAP and sit at around 200 reviews a day, which isn’t too far off from what you’re getting, and so far I haven’t had any particular struggles.
If anything it might get easier once you fully adapt to WK and your knowledge continues to increase and you read more and stuff
Thank you for making me feel a little bit more relaxed ! I was really worried I would be left with daily reviews of up and towards 500+
I would be very happy if I will be at the same pace that you seem to be in at level 26!! woah, I’m excited just thinking about it.
Do you do any reading through out the week? I find myself being discouraged because I’m still finding a lot of kanji that I have had no exposure to yet so I’m just reading very little. But I do re attempt every week.
I always say on these types of threads that if you do 20 lessons a day, you will go fast and never die. If that is too much take it down to 15. Language learning is a marathon not a sprint.
That’s just it, right there. You actually have full control over your own pace – well, with the slight exception that if/when you change your pace, your currently-already-scheduled reviews will still remain scheduled at their current times/dates, so it will take some lag time before the number of reviews you get on a daily basis slows down to match the number of new lessons you do each day (or week, for instance).
But if you just keep going at a comfortable pace – checking-in with yourself briefly each day, like, “How was that amount of reviews today? Too many / overwhelming? Too few?” – and adjust your lessons accordingly, then pretty soon the SRS system will settle in on your pacing and you can keep that comfortable pace going as long as you like.
Now, whether the actual difficulty of the kanji might require you to slow down on lessons or not – well, almost certainly after a few levels more, you’ll start getting back items at the Master and Enlightened level, and as that number of reviews increases, you’ll have to slow down a bit if you want to maintain your current comfort level. But, once you get past a certain point, even those reviews will balance out, and it will become more of a steady load for the remaining levels.
As for higher WK levels, the kanji do become more difficult and may require slowing down for that reason also. But on the other hand, you also kind of ‘learn how to learn kanji’ more, so in a way the entire process becomes ‘easier’ in a certain sense. Once again, if you just maintain a comfortable lesson/review load on a day to day basis, the SRS will balance out over time, so it should be sustainable all the way through.
However, many people (myself included when I first started) try to sustain a rather high load for a while, and then eventually when they (for example) have to take a break for whatever reason, when they come back they find a giant stack of reviews, and that can be really daunting and lead to burn-out. But again, it’s usually because of trying to maintain too high of a pace for a while and not slowing down to a more comfortable/sustainable pace.
If you ever do get to that point of being overwhelmed, you can just slow down and eventually the system will sort itself out. I ended up doing that, and there’s even a group thread for folks who choose to take things slower: Let’s Durtle the Scenic Route
That’s very high accuracy! Perhaps even ‘too’ high, in the sense that it seems like maybe using the retry script too much. Mistakes are okay, even typos. They allow the SRS system to adapt to your natural accuracy, and give you more chances to practice on kanji that ‘stick’ less than other kanji.
If you artificially boosting your accuracy with retries all the time, then when the reviews come back at Master and Enlightened level, your going to struggle much more with remembering them. They won’t feel familiar (from practice), and you might get down on yourself like, “Oh, I should have known that one! I’ll just do another retry.” IMHO It’s better to just let it be a mistake, and just practice it again a couple more times until it really does become familiar and you don’t have to think so hard about each answer, it just comes easily.
The goal is not to advance WK levels as fast as possible (well, unless that really is your goal, I guess). The goal is to learn the kanji so you can read and understand Japanese better. The whole level system and all that is just to add some spice and fun to the learning process, but it’s best (IMHO) not to take the ‘game’ aspects too seriously. That can easily lead to overwhelm and burnout.
wct makes a good point re. accuracy. I’m not using any scripts, just dealing with life as it comes… my accuracy over my 200 daily reviews is around 70%. I have a mix of knowledge levels in that. If I don’t know a thing, I need to see it again at SRS frequency to get it into long-term memory.
Lately, I took Sainir’s advice of “20 a day, seems OK”… it’s leveled out the daily feed over the last few months. I’m still getting a few massive dumps of 200 at once when the higher-level reviews from my early, crazy “do everything as soon as it unlocks” days come back.
It didn’t really get “easier”, since it’s all different kanji (at least up through level 39). I have found lately that I’m recognizing more kanji without requiring lookup in my day-to-day consumption of Japanese material. There less of that feeling that “I’m studying all the time and I still can’t read anything” like in the earlier levels.
Absolutely this. I made the mistake the first few levels of over-using the retry script and it was very challenging to correct and very difficult to get through some of my first burns because I hadn’t learned them as well as I thought I did. Personally I think an accuracy of >%96 is probably too high unless you really do know kanji super well already from another source.
I’m on level 58 now after about 14 months, almost to the “end” The reviews for me started feeling intense around ~20-30 as they started to approach a “max” where I am burning about the same rate as I’m learning new stuff. Once you adapt you adapt though, most days I have about ~14-20 lessons (I started spreading them out around level 15 which helped a TON I recommend doing that asap) and about 230-270 reviews.
The hardest part for me so far - and I’ve been using WK daily since January, was level 10-11. I was away for three weeks on an extended vacation/business trip and set WK to vacation mode.
When I came back, I was getting my initial burns plus everything in my queue. It felt like I forgot everything and kept getting things wrong. My apprentice items ballooned to the mid-200s and I was reviewing like a madman. Because of the backlog, I had something like 150 lessons waiting. I seriously thought about quitting, but kept putting one foot in front of the other. I managed to get my apprentice items down to the low 70s before I started doing lessons again and then cleared out all my lessons.
Now, I do about ten lessons a day and have been moving at a steady clip without issue. But wow - the introduction to the hell levels did not disappoint!
No. It gets way easier, lessons take a fraction to do and the reviews are more automatic (probably quicker aswell). I barely read the mnemonics past 50, 30+ I just skimmed them over. The more you learn, the easier it is to learn.
To offer a different perspective, I get ~350 reviews every day and I don’t do all my lessons at once. I do only the most important to level up radicals and kanji immediately and then ~21 vocab a day. If I were to do all my lessons I probably would get close to 500 if not more. You doing all your lessons right now will cause them to come back in large amounts at later dates creating a painful time for you, I would recommend slowing down, at least a little bit, because there is genuinely no reason to do all your lessons at once, you can still level up at max speed without doing them as they show.
Don’t worry about it, you’re only level 5, I’d be wondering why you’re even on the website if you could pick up a book and read it already. Generally you shouldn’t expect to read native content until ~level 20, you can start earlier, but you’re limited to graded readers, and even when you’re level 20 you have to limit yourself to easy books, otherwise you’re in for constant searching up.
Seems like you are very motivated to learn, so I’d recommend learning some grammar now, it is essential.
Let me start by saying thank you for your time and effort writing such an in-depth reply and with such valuable advice and perspective!
I do want to mention this one thing to provide some background on my Japanese immersion: From day 1, my love for Japanese was to be able to read, and I have had probably over 8-9 years of exposure just dedicated to listening (and trying to read very little at a time over multiple years).
I burned out many times with other methods and always starting from 0 again and again, so I think that is what makes me so confident and familiar with these first few levels of Kanji .
I can confidently say that I am not artificially enhancing my accuracy (on these kanji/ words at least). It’s more so that I have seen them so much I already know them when I see them in lessons.
I worry that once I reach a point/ level that I am seeing words that I am not as confident with the new vocab/ Kanji, I will suddenly be used to such a pace that I was at when I knew all the content I was being thrown at before to all of a sudden seeing brand new content.
And that is where I think I can use the advice of, “slow down the Lessons until I find a steady pace I am comfortable with”
A few examples were words like 広がる, (子供の明るい笑い声が森の中に広がった - "…their voice could be heard far and wide). This is just an example of what my current stance is on the topic. I would say this is like to widen but if I wrote that or some thing similar It would result in a fail. But my knowledge of this word is still correct, just the translation was a little off. I personally am using WK with the end goal to be able to read native Japanese level content, as I’m sure most others are as well. So to me this is not something I would need to keep as a failed card. Correct me if I’m wrong though!
How on earth do you do that? please teach me your ways!! I don’t get the option of what order I get to do my lessons in. It’s all in bunches of 5 random cards (vocab/ radical/ or Kanji).
I don’t see how you would be able to proceed at the same MAX SPEED by delaying the lessons? Any further enlightenment on this would be very appreciated
Any recommendations on where to learn grammar?
Thank you very much for your reply and input on my question
Yes, this is the case for me as the lower levels are consisting of Kanji I have been surrounded by over many years, It’s almost second nature to me to know their general meaning and use cases in written Japanese.
I hope to slow down the Lessons taken per day when I get towards the content that is brand new to me!!
)
I love reading about other fellow WK user’s take on this journey!
. Thank you for your high level 60 expertise and view on my dilemma senpai!
! I was really worried I would be left with daily reviews of up and towards 500+ 
Let’s Durtle the Scenic Route 
