I would like to hear your opinion on a problem I am having.
I am currently lvl31 but have 404 open vocabulary lessons reaching back to lvl27.
From december last year on until this week I had a study break because my Work and private life was pretty demanding. But now I am back here, have my reviews at 0 since a few days and am ready to get back into it again with my eyes set on the N2 in winter.
Now I am contemplating if I should first catch up with all the vocabulary lessons I had missed or if I should just leave that behind and start doing my current levels content to make progress.
With a pace of 15 new items a day I would need 27 days to do all the 404 old lessons. Thats about a month not progressing my wanikani level. On one hand I feel like doing all the lessons would help to hammer in the kanji from the last levels, especially since I had a pretty long break. On the other hand I am thinking that I will encounter the most important words in preperation for the N2 anyways and should concentrate on progress.
If your studying for the N2 I would suggest that you compare the WaniKani Kanji of the next few Levels with a list of N2-Kanji.
Which Kanjis do you need to know?
Which Kanjis do you still need to learn?
Is WaniKani teaching you already too many from N1?
Would it be more efficient to Study the Rest on your own?
Are the vocabulary with Kanji lower than N1? You don’t have to learn all of them. You can decided which one you learn.
What is more important? Leveling Up or preparing for N2?
I Hope These questions will Help you making a decision.
These aren’t the only options, of course – there’s also a middle way where you do new level stuff at a slower pace and use the extra space that creates to whittle away at the vocab backlog.
WK has Lesson Picker as an advanced feature, that you can pick vocabularies that are worth learning.
However, imo, you can try to learn them all if you can, as WK vocab lists aren’t supposed to be harder than N2. Though, practical duplicates are to be worried about – more SRS fillers, and unoptimized SRS intervals. Also, you can’t make vocab more important to reading/listening exercises.
The goal of learning is to learn, so whatever way gets you there is the right way.
If you’re using other means to cram vocab, there is no point in doubling up on WK. You can use the lesson picker, so it doesn’t have to be a black or white situation. Skip what you know, add any unknown items that you want to learn through the WK SRS.
At level 30 and with an eye on N2, I assume you’re already reading quite a lot, so you don’t necessarily need everything in an SRS as long as you’re reading consistently. Reading will cover the common stuff, and SRS the less common stuff so that it stays fresh.
I was in a somewhat similar situation when I abused lesson picker to neglect vocab in favor of radicals and kanji (to level up quickly). But then I realized it was not doing me as much good as I hoped for, because vocab, apart from being useful in itself, helps memorize kanji better. So, using lesson picker, I started doing at least 10 vocab lessons per day and it helped.
Then again, everyone is different, so only you can decide what’s best for you…
In any case, best of luck with your studies!
P. S.
At this point I thought the rest of the sentence would be
… NOT_FOUND error, whenever I try to do more lessons / reviews
