You’ve finished your first lessons. Now what?

Actually, you have to wait.

As you know, WaniKani’s review timings use a spaced repetition system. That is, the better you do, the longer it will be until you see an item again. Our goal is to give you a review right before you forget something. By doing this, your brain places greater importance on memorizing it, so essentially you are able to review the item fewer overall times with the same or better results.

When you have more items in your Review pile, you’ll never be bored and rarely have to wait (or, you’ll learn to enjoy the quiet times). But, since each kanji relies on past, proven knowledge of radicals to unlock, you can’t just jump into kanji right away. Learning this much kanji is going to be a longish-term effort no matter what, so what’s a couple of weeks of “slowness” in exchange for a much faster overall speed?

To minimize the amount of waiting you do in the early levels, we recommend you do all your Lessons and Reviews as soon as they’re available. If you get things right, your first set of radicals will begin unlocking kanji in a few days.

While you’re waiting, have some fun exploring our widgets — peek at the Review Forecast to see what’s coming, or try out the Extra Study widget to give tricky items a little extra practice. You can also brush up with Tofugu’s hiragana and katakana guides, check out other fun Tofugu articles, or hang out on the WaniKani forum and see what the community is up to.