So, a while back I had a large back log (see title) and I wasn’t too enthused at getting back into a good routine, however since I knew that doing all of the reviews at once would nigh on kill me, I decided on just trying, for a while, do a solid amount of reviews each day and see where the review stack goes. I mean, the amount of reviews you have to do everyday for a sustainable schedule can’t be that many, so if I do that +1%, I will eventually deplete the entire backlog without even having to slow down (gotta go fast, and that jizz).
And that is exactly what I did. I decided to put up a little post to maybe motivate someone else, who’s also slipped underneath a large pile of reviews and maybe prevent them from quitting (that is quitting against their own will, because they’re despairing more than anything else).
So what I did was use the Reorder Script to do level progressing reviews, that is the new radicals and new kanji, up to guru. The most important thing I feel is preventing burnout so what I did was install the Wrap-up button enhancement script, so that I would only do my daily goal of reviews, and no more. Just set the wrap up amount to the desired number and hit the button, then when you’ve done your reviews it automatically ends. Even if you sometimes want to do more and other times you don’t want to do the entire set, I feel consistency (sustainable consistency) is key above all else.
For additional proof I’ve included my manual logging of the amount of total reviews and apprentice items every day.
(logged after doing the level up reviews and all of the unlocks available, and before doing the daily amount of reviews)
Total amount of reviews
And the amount of apprentice items
So there you can see. even though it took a very long times 62 days now, this isn’t long considering that I’ve already been using Wanikani for about a year and that I have many times the time spent here left before level 60. So really it wasn’t such a bad concentrated effort to get back on track, since now I’m even sort of missing the large amount of reviews, I’ve been annoyed that I have to wait until the evening to have a sizable chunk of reviews left. However in the long run this is I think the most conducive thing I’ve ever done to actually stepping towards learning Japanese, which is what I assume most of the peeps are here for.
To wrap up an important notice to derive from the graphs is how slow progress seems at the beginning. Even though I had a lot of apprentice items, many of my reviews were for older items so it took 2 weeks before I started to deplete the apprentices. Secondly note how much the total reviews can swing back and forth, before eventually settling down just before the end.
Some really useful scripts that I find make dealing with reviews much easier.
WK Reviews: The Final Countdown (userscript)
You can add a timer. This means you’ll concentrate on the reviews more and for me and added benefit of tightening it as much as possible, was that my touch typing has dramatically improved since I’m now actually trying to type fast and with the [Userscript] auto-commit; the end of the enter key, I had to concentrate on not making spelling mistakes since the script only checks for exact matches. And as a mandatory complement the ignore button script (unfortunately I can’t find where I got this script from so I can’t link to it :[ ) so that you won’t be penalized for running out the timer.
That’s it, がんばってね。
[insert anime face here]
[insert motivational anime gif here]
[don’t forget additional feigned enthusiasm here]
[edit: apparently I forgot that they’re called lessons not unlocks]