I want to start off by saying I really have been enjoying WK so far, I am a little bit into level 4 and think for the most part the system works pretty well. It does however seem that the site is set up in such a way that if I continue to progress as soon as things become available I am inevitably waiting for up to two days with nothing to do in order to move onto the next set. As someone who’s paying for the service this is a little disheartening. It seems that new characters could be introduced in the interim so that there wasn’t such a large waiting gap.
Don’t worry, give it a few more levels and reviews will begin to pile up. There will become a point in the not to distant future that you have a debate with yourself on if you should even do more lessons, or just whittle down the massive review pile for a while.
As DaisukeJigen already said, things pile up. For about 75% of my WK tenure, I had between 150-250 reviews a day, at the least.
And WK is only a kanji learning resource, of course. There is plenty of other Japanese learning stuff that you can and probaly should devote yourself to, like grammar and vocab resources. ^^
Well you are only level 4 so for now you don’t have many kanji/vocabulary but at higher levels you will have so many that more or less you will always have stuff to review.
To OP: I pay for my gym membership, yet have to “pay to wait” while I let my muscles rest. Japanese is a huge language and you can’t scarf down the thousands upon thousands of phrases. The work-load becomes much more gargantuan as you progress deeper into the language.
WaniKani moves at a fixed speed to affirm memorization of each item was successful. Other Kanji resources such as textbooks would be required if you want to learn new items while you’re waiting on this service. Or find a different service altogether.
About two months in, you’ll begin getting swamped with at least two hours of reviews per day on WaniKani. You’re in the elementary stage right now. There is no way (even through scripts or custom user settings) to increase review speed at this or any point.
Wow so many responses! I’ll wait it out, I guess I should have started earlier, part of it is that I’ll be continuing courses in a couple months so it would be better to be in review hell now.
According to your profile you already made it to level 26 once, right? So going through a second time is going to feel slower if you’ve already seen everything before, no?
And it does raise the question of why you restarted? If you don’t mind sharing.
When I was at level 26 it felt the same.
I restarted because I was away from home for a few months and I only had like an hour a day on the phone, so when I came back I forgot a lot of stuff and decided it would be better if I restarted.
Well, if you can maintain the roughly seven day pace for levels and it feels slow, that says more about your ability than the site I think. Most people find it pretty tough.
They’ve stated their case with regard to the system and the pace plenty so I won’t rehash it. I do think the percentage of people who would choose a pace faster than the current max would be pretty small. It’s already a small percentage who go at max pace now.
Maybe you’re right, but it could be that the current method to go at max pace doesn’t reap many benefits and is too hard to achieve because of the way the system is built. But I don’t know, I haven’t tried any other way except Anki which wasn’t very good.
I am now at day 280 of my Wanikani journey and I have learnt 5562 items so far, which makes an average of about 20 new items per day. And don’t forget that each one of these items comes back in at least 8 reviews (or more if you make errors) until it gets burned.
