first of all, you are awesome.
I can’t imagine a community with a better vibe for my kanji journey!
As I just started, I did my lessons and reviews whenever they were available.
I saw that usually lessons and reviews will get much more the more you use the service and level up.
I wonder how hard it is from a certain level on to keep doing reviews & lessons right away when more and more are available.
Is there anyone that does their reviews and lessons daily that is on a higher level with a bigger workload and could tell me how many lessons / reviews they approximately daily have?
I’m trying to go about eight days per level. I try to do my lessons and reviews very quickly, but I don’t necessarily try to get the best time down. As fast as possible, but whenever I can.
For someone of my pace and at my level, they’ll probably be doing about 200 reviews daily. At least for me my heat map shows I do about 150-250 reviews daily, but if your accuracy is worse, you’ll probably do more.
As for lessons, every time you level up you’ll unlock the rest of the vocab lessons of your previous level, radical and most kanji lessons from your new level, as well as some vocabulary lessons from the new level. This should be about 70-120 lessons usually. I try to get these lessons in rotation as fast as I can, but I usually only do about 15 to max. 30 in one sitting. The next batch of 15-30 I’ll do earliest four hours later, after having reviewed the lessons I just did. Typically that’s 50 lessons a day, typically I’ll get to 0 lessons within two days.
On average, I spend about 1 hour on Wanikani per day.
Although do note I’m probably what people would assume to be on the faster site. If I’ve observed this correctly, the majority only does a set amount of lessons, about 10-20 a day and just sees how far it gets them, not minding the speed too much. A slower pace is completely acceptable.
For me the reason of going fast is because I took year off after graduating high school, before going to university. I only work part-time right now and have more time than most people on here do. And I have the deadline of having to learn Japanese in one year, because I’ll be learning two languages at once in my university curriculum. My grammar and vocabulary is also way ahead of my Kanji knowledge, and I just want to be able to read books as soon as possible.
If you don’t have circumstances similar to that, I don’t think you have a reason to imitate that. Going at a slower pace and spending only 30 minutes a day will get you very far in the long run.
For me (before i reset from level 22) i used to do it free form, like however many lessons i felt like doing that day. But that does make for some really heavy review days, and some really light ones, not so regular. I know some people pick a certain number of lessons to do per day (eg. 5, or 10) to keep things regular and maybe also easier to manage. You generally get somehwere around 100 new lessons when you level up, and doing them all at once might overload you, so i would suggest spreading them out however you see fit, to maintain the pace youre going for. I think it depends on the time you have for reviews, really. People can get anywhere from 100 to 200 reviews per day, but it really depends on how fast you do the lessons, it could be more or less than that
Sorry if this wasn’t super helpful and good luck on you wk journey!
12 Lessons per day, 3 kanji, 9 vocab. I end up with between 70 - 100 reviews per day depending on if radicals show up, although I haven’t gotten to the point of burns yet. Once the burns start the number should increase by another 10 or so per day.
This is basically it. I just wanted to add this screenshot for reference of what my week looks like at about LVL30. This is at the end of the level, mind you, but it is just to show that it is not as scary as it can seem in those workload accumulation graphics.
Just a tip, make sure to always adjust WaniKani to your life and not your life to WaniKani. There’s no need to rush; and remember, consistency always beats intensity.
It takes a long time to burn anything - I started in December and am just recently started burning cards that I never made a mistake on. My experience has been the number of reviews really start adding up, so around level 10 or so I needed to slow down the # of new cards. I’m trying to keep the # of apprentice cards around 100, so when I level up I wait for the number of apprentice cards to drop a bit, then learn new cards until I get through the new radicals (usually have to go through 50+ vocab words to get to the radicals, but there might be a way to pick which cards you’ll learn first that I haven’t figured out). That way I can prioritize unlocking the second set of kanji each level. It helps that I’ve also been using Anki to memorize kanji as I got through Minna no Nihongo, so I get some “freebies” each level. It took me 25 days for my last level averaging I think around 100 reviews a day, but other levels 10-18 were 8-15 days, so hopefully that was a fluke. Levels 1-9 were about 8 days each, but there’s no way I could keep that up and also make progress with textbook studying.
That’s actually down from 500 reviews available at 5 a.m.
The lesson here is do not go at the fastest pace in the fast levels unless you have hours and hours to devote to WK. Instead, keep things reasonable with the order and number of lessons you do.
My Review streak is 187 days currently.
I’m not trying to demotivate you, but just warn you about the dangers of speed running with lessons.
thank you so much for your advice.
So you’d say that it’s better to do your reviews daily but not necessarily start with all of the new lessons right away?
One thing to keep in mind is that there’s a delay due to the intervals. So completely stopping lessons today won’t reduce your daily review load for 1-2 weeks depending on your level. You’ve still got to work though your current set until they get out of Apprentice and Guru.
I usually do about 100-130 reviews per day. My accuracy is high most of the time so I don’t have a ton of reviews coming back that I really need to drill in. I do 15 vocab per day and then after about a week of being on a new level and doing vocab I start Kanji. My target time per level is about two weeks.
when i was speedrunning WK, i was doing 20-30 lessons a day, and something over 200 reviews daily. i’m no good at time-keeping, but it took me well over an hour every day.
the time spent is totally manageable, the bigger issue is that to achieve maximum speeds, you need to do 3 sessions a day, spaced 4, 8, and 12 hours apart. and there is very little flexibility in the system, so you have to organise your days around WK, rather than organise WK around your days. and if anything interrupts your schedule…
my speedrunning days came to a screeching halt due to health issues. these days i have a much gentler schedule which allows for more flexibility and can accommodate sick-days, and spend any extra time on stuff like reading, which also isn’t time-critical
To be specific, you won’t have any enlightened items to review until you’ve been reviewing items daily for a little over six months. This seems like a long time … for about six months, then you stop thinking about it.
@Mo-Kanji: Note that until you start seeing enlightened items in your review queue, you won’t be able to gauge how hard your workload really is. It can be eye-opening to review an item that you haven’t seen for four months.
Every review and lesson you do today will affect your workload for months in the future. As stated by others, a common rule of thumb is to pace your lessons such that the number of apprentice items remains below ~100. A better one IMO, is to keep the number of apprentice items + guru items/10 under ~150. It’s hard to get into too much trouble if you follow this advice. (I even wrote a userscript to make this more visually manageable.)
I’ve mostly done just one daily review session for about 2.5 years continuously, and have been averaging around 150 reviews per day (and 2-3 weeks per level) for most of that time. That’s just one datapoint (many prefer to go faster, others slower).
Doing just one session per day (if that’s your question) doesn’t let you catch the 4hour and 8hour schedules, so tends to be much slower than 2 or more sessions per day. If, like me, you choose to only do your reviews once per day, I STRONGLY recommend also using the extra study feature for recent lessons prior to doing your reviews.
I would definitely not recommend doing all of your lessons as soon as you unlock them in the higher levels. You are right to be cautious!
There are multiple methods for reducing your daily review counts. All of them take time before you can see the full the effect of implementing them. You won’t see all of the effects of your study decisions until six months after you make them (which is about when burn reviews come in). So it’s a good idea to think about your future self when deciding how many lessons you’re doing.
The two most popular methods of limiting your reviews are by avoiding doing more lessons if your apprentice/guru counts reach above a certain number (a 100 apprentice limit is the one I see thrown around the most), or my personal favorite, which is simply doing the same number of lessons every day. You can adjust the number depending on how fast you are able to go. Your accuracy and number of WK review sessions a day will also influence the number of reviews you get, and your overall speed of progression.
For more information about the SRS timings and creating a schedule around WK, as well as lots of other tips, I definitely recommend checking out the ultimate guide to WK, which was linked earlier in the thread.
To answer your question, personally, I do 3 kanji and 9 vocab lessons a day (using the lesson filter userscript), and I get on average 130 reviews every day (split between at least three review sessions). I level up every 12-14 days. It’s a really good pace, and I’m very happy with it. It results in a consistent, balanced workload. It’s not the fastest pace, but I have plenty of non-kanji aspects of Japanese I’m working on in the meantime, so I don’t mind taking things a little more slowly.
and good luck on you wk journey!
