I have just deployed an update that introduces two new features to the “Advanced” lessons page.
Firstly, you can now start a batch of lessons right away by clicking the “Batch, Please” button.
Secondly, you now have the option to interleave your lessons to match the ordering used in Today’s Lessons.
You can read more about these changes here.
Nice, thanks for bringing in new features!
Would it be possible to add a selector of what item types you want to include in the lesson batch: radicals, kanji, vocab, kana only?
So when you click “batch, please” it’ll make a batch only including selected item types. By default, all items are selected.
Yay!
This is something that I had really wanted since the rollout of the lesson picker. Thanks a lot to the WK team!
Nice. Really appreciate the interleave permanent opting out in setting. Had to double take entering advance mode to do some lessons about three hours before the official announcement so I checked out the WaniKani update log through the help section and waited to the official announcement to say thank you. The Lesson Picker was a huge game changer (literally) glad I started using WaniKani again after you added it, really improved my user experience with the lessons. Thank you.
now all you need to do is to find a way to implement a skip (so I can have another chance to recall an item at the end of the session and undo (for typos ‘cause phone and three letter words and time management) to reviews, and I won’t need a third party app anymore
New features arigatou.
How is ‘batch please’ any different to just clicking ‘Start lessons’? Kind of sounds like the same thing. But maybe you can keep doing it after the daily lessons run out…?
I had to check the dictionary to see if interleave was a real word. Apparently it is! English level up!
The “Start Lessons” button was only available after you had selected some items. The “Batch, Please” button is meant to reduce friction by being able to start a batch of lessons without first clicking “select all”. The idea of just doing one batch is helpful to some users who might be reluctant to click ‘select all’ when they don’t actually want to do all of their lessons. Technically it is no different than selecting all the items then clicking start, but mentally it helps if you just want to do one batch.
This was so close to being such an awesome update but I’m really confused why you only added the option to interlieve the lessons in the Advanced page and not on the main page? I was so excited to see that you guys finally listened to the feedback from months ago and finally allowed us to turn off this setting… Only to realize that you didn’t allow us to turn it off, but instead just let us turn it on for even more parts of the app.
Still, I love this update. More options and a smoother interface is always very welcome! The “Batch, please” button will save me a click every time I do my lessons which is really nice, and the ability to interlieve the lessons from the Lesson Picker will also probably be pretty useful to some people.
Now all that’s missing is the ability to stop interlieving the lessons when started from the main menu. Doing that would finally save me one additional click and bring me back to my one-click flow I had before. As of yesterday I had 3 clicks, now I have 2 after this change. I would love being able to go back to just 1.
Either way tho, thanks for the update!
And how is that any different to just doing the lessons from outside the Advanced Lessons screen?
With the “Batch, please” button, you can choose whether to have your lessons interlieved or not. On the home page, you don’t have that choice and are forced to have them interlieved.
Which is why I’m really hoping they’ll add that opinion. It doesn’t make sense that you’re forced to have your lessons interlieved from one menu, but have the choice on another menu. If I’m already changing a setting in my settings screen I should be able to change the setting for either menu, not only the less convenient of the two.
Additionally, the “Batch, please” button can be used even when you’ve completed all your recommended daily lessons. Meanwhile the button on the homescreen will have disappeared by then. Hopefully that clears up the confusion behind what the difference is.
I’m curious about why lessons are interleaved by default. I presume WK consider it beneficial compared to not interleaving? I’d like to know more about that.
That’s a little… underwhelming. I’m just level 5 but I would rather finally have some typo protection than something that let’s me do the same thing I was doing already but in a different way 
I also updated the knowledge guide which is linked to from the Lesson Picker page. In the knowledge guide I provided a link to further information which you may find useful or insightful.
Thanks for the signposting Scott!
The setting does not work.
I’ve turned interleave off and i still get mixed lessons
when clicking on “Start Lessons”.
From what I’ve read it looks like the interleave on/off setting only works when starting lessons from the ‘Advanced’ menu. If you hit ‘Start Lessons’, your lessons will be interleaved regardless.
Yep, this is exactly correct. I really hope they’ll fix that.
Yeah that’s what I meant, the Start lessons button on the home screen. Seem like it would be easier to just click that rather than go to an extra screen?
I guess the answer is, it’s the same but you can select an extra checkbox fi you want. And you can do more after the home screen says you are done for the day.
It really feels like something that should just be abstracted from the user. We shouldn’t be deciding - “should I interleave my session” - we should just be given our next batch of lessons to study. Would much prefer they spent valuable developer time on features which pushed the needle and made WaniKani better.
I have no idea what you mean by this. If more features and options don’t make WaniKani better in your opinion, what does? I’m genuinely curious and would be glad to hear.
I, personally, always appreciate more options. I don’t think it’s “burdening the user” to let them make their own choices with an out-of-the-way setting that they never need to touch if they don’t want to.
Were you aware of the concept of interleaving prior to this release? If you look at the link posted, interleaving is an obscure concept related to how one approaches learning groups of information. To give the user this sort of control is very advanced fine tuning of the learning process. One of the main sells of WaniKani is the gamified simple approach to learning kanji - you outsource all the decision making about what kanji to learn when, and you just do what your told. Introducing this “interleaving” feature brings that back “in house, to the user” if you will.
If I’m going to make use of the interleaving feature, I have to have the understanding of the process I am following, rather than just following the gamified process.
This release feels like a plugin someone could have made, rather than a useful feature. And at a deeper level it gives me a sense of misalignment from the product team and the customer base. I’m not sure who they made this feature for, I don’t think anyone was asking for it, whilst there are countless other useful features requested on a regular basis.