So, I’ve been having a problem with WK’s scheduling. Because of the way WK works, it tends to give large chunks of similar vocabulary all at once. This isn’t a bad thing for learning. But they tend to get ‘locked’ together, always coming up during the same review session. This is allowing a certain amount of ‘cheating’ where I get a whole blob of reviews right only because the early reviews refreshed my memories. This is ok during early Apprentice levels, might even be helpful for getting ideas to stick. But at Guru and above, I’d really like to not get things right through ‘dubious’ means.
So, I’ve tried spacing out my lessons to reduce this, but in the early stages, they tend to clump up overnight again. Intentionally getting things wrong doesn’t seem ideal either.
The idea I’ve come up with is to add an option to add a random number of hours (say max of 5-10% of the current interval length) to the time until review for items at Guru or above. This would have the effect of slowing things down a bit at the higher levels, but wouldn’t change leveling up at all. But related vocab would, over time spread out in time. That way, they’d not be clumped up so much.
I realize this only really matters to people who keep their review count low since vocab can separate if not done in the same review session. But it might have benefits even for review hoarders who occasionally purge their queue. It would smooth out the tidal wave of follow ups after a marathon session.
If anyone has any other ideas on how to manage this, let me know. I didn’t see anything in the historical records, but this may have come up before for all I know.
I would be very much in favour of something similar to this. Especially now I’m burning stuff, sometimes I will be reminded of a reading which will then help me burn a vocab which I might not have got without that reminder. It feels icky, for lack of a better word.
There’s got to be a script which helps ease this flaw in the WK system.
The WaniKani Reorder Ultimate 2 does allow randomizing lessons:
You just need to use the ランダム option while taking lessons (you can even click on it several times to re-roll the random lessons if you don’t like the ones that got picked)
A couple warnings though:
In one occasion, the randomized order caused me to take a lesson where the reading explanation relied on a vocabulary from the same level that I was supposed to take before, but I hadn’t.
There’s been cases of users abusing this script to only take their radical and kanji lessons and ignoring vocab for faster leveling, but hurting their overall retention since they lacked the reinforcement vocabulary provides.
Does it? I thought it was only for reordering within lessons/reviews. How do you get it to change interval times? I don’t see that in the instructions.
Sorry, I should have mentioned that it doesn’t do it in the way you specified. However, I feel it helps quite a bit, depending on what is your schedule for taking lessons.
In my case, for example, I take 5 lessons in the morning, 5 at noon, and 5 at night. By using the Reorder script to randomize the lessons, it is very unlikely that I get two vocabulary lessons with the same kanji in the same batch. This means that when they eventually come back for review, they will also be separated at the very least by a few hours, but very often by a day or more, depending on how my randomness lucked out.
Of course, this benefit is greatly diminished if you tend to take large batches of lessons, since no matter how randomized they are, it is more likely you’ll get vocab lessons that share a kanji; thus, using the script is mostly beneficial if you take small spaced batches, instead of big batches.
No worries. I wasn’t sure I wasn’t missing something. There’s a lot of options in that script. It’s a bit overwhelming.
So I do do my lessons in bigger batches for radicals and kanji, but try to space them out with vocabulary. So this is a good idea for minimizing the batches when leveling up several kanji at once. Not so good for when only one or two guru at the same time. I suppose I could delay lessons until there was some ‘critical mass’ of vocab waiting, then do them randomized, spaced over a few days… That might work, assuming I space it enough that overnight clumping doesn’t undo all the work. But I think the review skip thing that the Ultimate Reorder does might be a way to get around that, too. Hmmm.
I think I’d still prefer a way to add a bit of randomness into review times, but this is worth trying. I’ll give it a go.
Although Koichi has said many times that randomising review items is better for memorisation, WK often gives you the reading and meaning of the same item back-to-back. They should implement a feature where if you review the reading of 人, for example, the very next review item cannot be the meaning of 人. This happens even more often in lessons because of the low number of items.
Just get some of them wrong then the SRS intervals will be different again.
Actually yeah I get the same problem for some items, sometimes even up to the burn interval. Seeing them together is like “oh yeah at that time I learned x1, x2, x3, …, xn” and it can sometimes help me get the meaning based on what i havent seen yet that I know was in there.
