Extra Study Mode

You know those radicals, kanji, and vocabulary that give you trouble in your reviews?

Newly learned items.

Kanji that look like other kanji.

Vocabulary with similar meanings.

Transitive / Intransitive verbs.

Exceptional readings.

That one vocabulary word that for whatever reason doesn’t fit with how your brain works. At all.

I could probably go on for a bit.

To help with those, and more, we’ve added an “Extra Study” mode on WaniKani. These are separate review sets covering specific groups of items that don’t count toward—or against—your regular Lessons and Reviews. They are, well, a way to get in some extra study.

As of right now, we’ve added two Extra Study groups that you can use:

  1. Recent Lessons: As the name suggests, these are Lessons you completed recently. I’m stating the obvious here, but things you’ve just learned are things you’re most likely to forget. The memory has barely formed, after all. Review these items a few extra times after learning them in Lessons and you’ll find yourself recalling them better in Reviews.
  2. Recent Mistakes: Recent mistakes is populated by the items you recently got incorrect in your Reviews. You can now easily spend a little extra time with them so you remember them in your next Reviews session. I’d recommend running through this group as soon as you finish a review session (assuming you get anything wrong).

We think Recent Lessons and Recent Mistakes will help you to memorize those trouble-items more effectively. In some cases, even prevent them. Spending a little time in Extra Study should help you to spend less overall time in your Reviews. At the very least, you may be able to take care of some of those leeches.

We also see the potential for some other “Extra Study” item groups (ones we haven’t added, yet). You may see more Extra Study options in the future, though we think these two are going to be the most useful for most of you right now.

Please try it out and let us know what you think. And if you find any bugs or problems, please email us at hello@wanikani.com and we’ll take care of them.

よろしく from all of us

Q. Won’t this mess up the SRS?
A. I don’t believe so. SRS is more about time management as it is about memorization. Studying the same things a whole bunch will lead to memorization, too. Spaced repetition is just a much more time-efficient way of doing it. It lets you study each item less often, so you can spend your time studying more in the same amount of time. But, there are always some radicals, kanji, and vocabulary that will especially benefit from extra study. That’s what this is focused on. We think it’s a good balance between studying more and being smart about how much time you spend doing it.

Q. Do I have to do these extra reviews?
A. Nope. You can still progress through WaniKani without touching the Extra Study options.

Q. Do I need to pay more to access Extra Study?
A. No, it is a part of your subscription. Free users will also have access to any unlocked items they have, levels 1-3.

Q. How often should I do Extra Study reviews?
A. That’s up to you. We don’t think it should take up a disproportionate amount of your study time. Use it if you feel like it’s helping, but if you’re doing well in your reviews already, you may not necessarily need it. There will be times when extra study will be helpful, and other times where it won’t. Using “Recent Mistakes” after a review session sounds helpful, for example. Or running through Recent Lessons after learning new items.

Q. Can I customize Extra Study sessions?
A. Not at this time, but we hope to add more Extra Study item groups in the future.

Q. I use a script that does this, why should I use WK’s built-in version?
A. Use whatever helps you to make more progress. I don’t care as long as you’re getting better at Japanese.

384 Likes

Neat!

That’s why you are the Overmind

111 Likes

This is pretty great! But I’m curious, if I take some time after a review session to do extra study, and by the time I do extra study the item is back for review again, will it still be in extra study while also being in reviews? I feel like it can mess up the reviews a bit.

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Hi,
as I use iPad with WaniKani, maybe some 50 percent of my mistakes are different touchscreen typos. Therefore the list of mistakes I have doesn’t necessarily correlate with the list of kanji and words I find troublesome.

In the future, could there be an option for an individual to add preferred kanji and words to the extra studies list based on one’s personal preferences?

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What a nice surprise! I would love a “Oldest Burned” extra study as well.

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Great, I always mess up new kanji a lot, so I’ve been using a script to review them until now. It’s nice to be able to do this with the normal review interface now :grin:

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I love it!! Thank you!

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Neato, now I can do my reviews before I do my reviews.

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Nice to have this natively supported now! Can’t wait for the onslaught of userscript updates to deal with this now though.

Just went through some of them and, outside of userscripts not working, I found no problems. Would definitely like the option to randomise the items the same way as in standard review sessions (rather than it always be reading → meaning of vice versa). And as @kaytani mentioned, a burned item mode would be nice to have - either random burned or oldest.

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Great feature!

I have tested it for a day now. And it makes totally sense. As soon as I do mistakes, I run an extra study session. Same counts for new items. Wanikani became almost perfect with this feature.

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Funny thing. I got to level 60 today. And at first I thought that everyone get this additional mode after level 60. :smiley:

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I had a plugin that did something like that, but a native solution is great, especially on mobile!

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seems to work ok…

still would be nice to have ‘extra reviews’ interleaved with regular reviews (like ghost reviews) for leeches… w/o having to do additional review sessions [or a better built-in leech manager]

one example that might be kind of neat is take the missed items in the last 24 hours and interleave those the next day with the regular reviews… then no extra sessions (more reviews) but of course would need to be an option in the application settings to turn on/off…

lots of various options to make improvements of course…still desperately hoping WK builds a proper built-in leech manger…

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This is a great feature - thank you!

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This is a well needed upgrade. Thanks.

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This is awesome. It makes me really glad to see this rolled in officially.

I took a quick guess on some of the scripts I used and tried adding the extra_study path to the include and got mixed success.

Edit:

@koichi If you don’t mind me asking, what’s the metric for determining if an item is “recent”? Is it items in the past X hours/days? At least in my case the number of available study items is several days worth of lessons.

Agreed,

while it looks useful, i cant see myself ever using this as its mostly just new items that will be learned naturally soon anyways.

Actual calculation for late game leeches (those cycling in the guru-enlighten sphere, never to be burned) like some scripts offer would be much better. Maybe even track how those incorrect answers happened and if its due to similar item / transitivity, train those groups together so that you learn the difference properly.

Then again this at least shows willingness to implement new stuff, so maybe one day in the future.

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Are these extra reviews logged in the API?

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great addition

it shows for me 24 lessons and 51 recent mistakes, dont know if this is a lot of mistakes or acceptable. :sweat_smile:

This is wonderful! I basically asked for something like Extra Study, last week, and here it is. Amazing.
Although it makes me feel good to get 95% correct, it makes more sense for me to work harder on the 5% that I have trouble with, even if it’s harder on my ego.
Thank you.

4 Likes