Wish you could speed up 20% or 30%

WaniKani Feedback
42

I just want to share my personal experience as someone going at the fastest possible speed (I have no prior experience with kanji).
There were certainly times in the beginning when I felt like I could easily handle more. But once I settled into the SRS system and started to accumulate more and more reviews, the pacing made more sense to me. I don’t think it would be healthy to go much faster, and think the rate of burnout would increase if people took on more than they should. That would be as much of a problem for WaniKani as it would be for it’s users. I’m sure it’s not the best implementation of an SRS system out there, but it works really well for me. With that said, I could understand making some more of the early levels faster in the same way the first three are, because in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn’t be much of a detriment to your overall SRS experience.

Here’s a visualization with my workload graph because I love stats :slight_smile:

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43

One thing that hasn’t been mentioned so far is consistency. WaniKani is a product which requires a certain structure. It covers an average user experience and the various SRS intervals were either experimentally derived based on a smaller user base or just a ballpark.

If WaniKani offered the ability to speed up / slow down, in other words adjust the SRS intervals, it would be way harder for them to address the various concerns people might have while using a non-standard SRS setup and in general it would be difficult to track and maintain a specific WaniKani user experience.

As a very extreme example compare WaniKani to Duolingo. The latter constantly bombards the users with A/B testing and breaking changes, making it extremely difficult for users to raise concerns and/or relate between each other with respect to their user experience.

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What many people also forget is that alot of SRS, also means alot of immersion. Ideally atleast twice the amount of immersion to SRS-time I’d guess. It all adds up. 5-6 hours on japanese, not alot with that time.

But what if you skip immersion and just go SRS until you know all the joyo kanji? Good luck with that. By that time alot of the readings will be forgotten and what you’ve essentially done is studying the SRS, not japanese.

I get that alot of people are impatient in the beginning, but they don’t really know what they are jumping into most of the time. Burn out, get back, burn out, get back, rinse and repeat. 10 years later and no further than the language ability you had before.

Instead of going hard in the beginning and “burning out” (essentially doing things you don’t like) start making routines and slowly ramp them up, if it gets too much, dial it back abit, but never quit. Also important to find content that you enjoy.

Motivation is dumb, it’s pretty much all about discipline.

Rant over, didn’t even follow the thread and ended up in another place entirely. Need to dial back on my adhd-meds.

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At my pace, I certainly don’t get as much immersion as I should. It’s hard to fit much else in when you’re already spending 2-3 hours a day on WaniKani lol. This definitely isn’t efficient, but the speed does motivate me. While I will be losing a lot on retention, I think I’ll have a strong enough foundation for when the lessons stop coming and I can pivot more to immersion.

Also I especially agree with what you said about making routines. Routine has definitely been the most important factor of my journey and the earlier levels certainly eased me into that.

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I think the condescension you think you are experiencing comes from the fact that a lot of the people here have seen countless new users with the same mindeset and most of them realized later that the workload does indeed increase to a point where going faster would mean being overwhelmed. Or they simply drop out because they indeed overloaded themselves (and thats with the restrictions in place).

You can only really grasp your full workload about half a year in when burns are coming in, but if you realize then that the workload becomes to much, you will be miserable, because adding a lot of items at some point will affect you for every single SRS-interval. Additionally, at that point you have also probably started using additional resources that are also eating up time. You already use jpdb, but I assume you want to add grammar to your study curiculum too, for example.

I think a lot of the complaints from “low level” users don´t come because they can´t grasp how their future workload will be affected, but more so because they still use WK in a vaccuum and thats why this doesn´t really faze them.

In my opinion you should try and see what other aspects of japanese you can learn in the meantime. Maybe I´m also wrong and you can handle all of it just fine while going full speed, but then WK is probably the wrong tool for you. The limitations aren´t really in place to get more profit, but moreso because WaniKani offers a more guided approach to Kanji where it will do a lot of work for you and doesn´t want you to overwhelm yourself. And if you want to go full speeddemon with Kanji then there are more efficient tools to do that, but I think most learners don´t benefit from this kind of approach, but they will rather fall off and stop completely. And that is what WK wants to prevent.

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I was reading it as condensation too lol

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Hey, OP, I don’t use Wanikani since I prefer other tools. My Japanese level is okay-ish and I’ve been using SRS long enough to experience burnout and come back from it. I have about 9000 active SRS cards, for reference. What the more experienced users are saying is true, that burnout could easily occur if you could go as fast as you wanted at the start however I do think some of the responses in this thread definitely are condescending.

Regarding going faster and burnout, the Wanikani SRS is not adaptive and uses fixed intervals of days which means that if you go hard for two months and go slow for two months then you’ll end up with a big pile of reviews which will all come back together rather than things that you haven’t seen for a while being sent even further into the future if you get them right. Seems bad to me but meh that is one of the reasons I don’t use Wanikani. If you’re gonna use it then I think you kinda have to accept it as it is. And it is *extremely * rigid. Bunpro uses a similar system and I do use that and I guess I just suck it up.

Regarding making money by making the pace slow, to offer a counter opinion as someone who hasn’t sunk time or money into Wanikani, I think that the lifetime option actually is how Wanikani rakes it in since most people who learn Japanese quit very early on or stagnate at a very low level. Those people get sold on products, including Wanikani, buy a lifetime sub and then don’t get beyond level 20 or whatever. I have no hard information to back this up and it is just a personal theory. Basically, although I think Wanikani does try and extract as much money as it can from users (it is a business after all), I don’t think it does it by making the levels slow. In fact, I think making the levels slow probably helps retain users for enough months to convince them to buy a lifetime sub which they will stop using pretty soon after. Again, this is just a personal theory. Also it isn’t an attack on Wanikani, just how it seems to me.

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49

If you want to know, there is a thread: What is the level distribution on here? - #341 by BIsTheAnswer
It lists the levels of forum users. Granted, that is not all WK users, but still probably a good estimate.

Regarding the discussion in general (in case anyone is interested in my opinion)
  • I don’t think WK is slow, but I work full-time and have an active social life. 200 reviews per day is the absolute max I can manage, I prefer around 150.
  • If you already know a lot of kanji or have a ton of time and motivation to dedicate your life to studying Japanese, then I suggest looking for a different resource. Every resource has its target audience, if you are not WK’s, just move on :woman_shrugging: I don’t see the problem. A lot of people here recommend Anki, I personally don’t like it (tried like 5 times to get into it, always fell off after like 2 months), so I don’t use it.
  • “I like WK, but I want to go faster”: As many have already expressed: Things feel slow in the beginning. But more importantly: Often, life just happens. I find it admirable that there are people who are able to just go at it for 1/1.5 years and finish. But I think it is the minority.
  • As someone who uses multiple services for learning: WK is one of the most chilled companies, imho. The don’t constantly send you e-mails trying to push a new subscription on you and the don’t have different subscription tiers. They are super open about what subscription will cost you and what you will get (not like other resources that advertise a free account and then constantly push for you to subscribe and lock basically everything behind a paywall…). WK wants/needs to make money to pay their staff and that’s fine.
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That decision should be up to the users! Users already follow advice such as “keep your apprentice items under 100”, “only do 10 lessons a day”, etc, to keep the workload manageable if they can’t handle it. Why is it acceptable to want to go slower, but to go faster is met with such apprehension?

FWIW, I’m also at 7-8 day level ups since level 1, and my equivalent graph averages around 180-200 reviews a day. If at your review accuracy you’ve been dealing with 250 reviews a day, and you think that’s manageable, why can’t I increase the speed of the platform to reach that workload?

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Because that’s the program design philosophy Tofugu has decided on? If it doesn’t suit your style, there are plenty other programs, no one program will fit with everyone’s needs, but I’m sure they’ve discussed it a lot in their offices and decided this was how they want to shape their product, and it’s not like all this information isn’t provided out in the open before we had to pay or anything :person_shrugging:

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I know. I’m still around, after all. To be honest, I don’t expect anything to change now, since nothing has changed in the last decade. I just want to contribute to the opposing opinion since it’s what I believe in.

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Haha, no problem, my apologies if it seemed to be worded attacking, that wasn’t my intention, but intentions often carry badly over text :bowing_man: I’m also for my own use-cases on the no-restrictions camp in spirit, but I completely get and support the choice they made, so was playing a bit of devils advocate anyway :stuck_out_tongue:

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Because in most cases it would hurt the users to go faster? I don’t know, I’m also in favor of allowing a faster pace (by removing internal dependencies in levels, as was mentioned by someone else in the thread, so that every level is a fast level).
My only involvement in the thread came from the original statement that the current pace is set to delay users (i.e. hurting their progress for money) rather than to prevent burnouts (which helps progress).

… but things did change, though?!? They did make it faster.

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I would argue that the sort of person who spends that much time on WaniKani and wants even more work is an outlier and that it’s more beneficial to prevent the overall population from overburdening themselves instead of catering to the few who want to speed up. There are always other Japanese learning solutions out there that one can take on if they want more work.

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Oh? I did drop Japanese and WaniKani back in 2014 (ish?) and didn’t notice anything different when I came back. What did they change?

I thought I made a good point saying that an increase in my workload would bring me up to your workload. Does that mean you’re the outlier spending too much time on WaniKani? :stuck_out_tongue:

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More than I should, yes lol

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Uh no, that’s not how this works. The lifetime subscription only makes financial sense if you plan to spend more than 3 years on WaniKani - or more than 2 years if you happen to start exactly when the yearly sale is happening. That’s not an insanely slow pace, but it’s also not exactly fast. Plus you have to take into account people who get lifetime after they already paid for maybe a year or so.

In other words, if WK was faster, they would have to lower the price of lifetime or fewer people would buy it - generating less profit for them.

Businesses don’t offer discounts, lifetime subscriptions, etc. out of a goodness of their hearts but because it creates good-will with potential customers and convinces them to buy things they may not ultimately need. The drop-off rate for WK is pretty high and if you manage to convert at least some of these users that will later drop off to lifetime customers, it’s very lucrative.

I don’t fault WK at all for doing stuff like that, it’s just common sense pricing models, but let’s not pretend that there isn’t a business rationale for this.

As for the topic itself, I agree that the pacing of WK is weird and inflexible, although I wouldn’t say it’s too “slow”(*) once you’ve reached later levels. But without reorder script etc. it’s just not very balanced. Learning all the Kanji for a level at once and then learning all the vocab doesn’t strike me as a very good idea. That’s why I’m now using reorder to learn 5-10 Kanji + 10 vocab items a day, but it’s honestly a bit of a pain.

That said, these complaints have been around forever and nothing to me seems to indicate that WK is ever going to make the system more flexible, so I don’t see any alternative besides either accepting it and continuing with WK as intended, or dropping out and go use something else instead.

(*) What makes WK “slow” for me is not the gatekeeping between levels but the amount of vocab, a lot of which seems redundant in terms of teaching you certain readings. There’s absolutely no way to really skip vocab, you could maybe do some stuff with reordering, but I suppose that’s gonna be rather painful.

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The last level before validating a kanji (apprentice 4) was shortened from 3 days to 2 days back in 2016-ish? thus shaving off two days for long levels and one day for short levels.

I meant that once you have paid for lifetime, they should not care about your pace. I’m sure there would even be a clever way to market it as a “premium” subscription that allows you to set the timer (they even have code for custom timing in the API, so it would not even be hard to do) or customize your levels (so that you can just add as many radicals/kanji as you want at once). Both of those things would be pretty rational to do as well, but they don’t, which is why I trust that they have made the current pace with the intent of making it sustainable for users then set the price based on expected use.

I’m actually not even sure about that. Most people aren’t even able to go at max speed as it is now. Making max speed faster would only change things for a very marginal number of people (and if they are aiming to shave off as much money as possible, they are probably already just using the yearly subscription, since it’s possible to finish everything in less than one year)

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I agree when it comes to the pacing. As you write, very few people would be able to keep up with a faster pace.

But I’m totally convinced that the fact that WK doesn’t allow you to skip or bury any item, not even with user scripts, period, is due to them wanting to keep you around for longer.

And yeah, obviously many considerations play a role when coming up with pricing schemes. If you’re too obvious about squeezing as much money as possible out of users, that’ll probably backfire. My goal was only to point out that the lifetime subscription doesn’t contradict a desire for WK to keep you on the site for as long as possible.

(And as said - none of this is morally reprehensible, it’s just how businesses operate)

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They’ve also shaved time off of intervals, though I don’t know the timeline.

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