I also really appreciate that missing hour. Like others have said, it lets you “work back” to your normal schedule if you slip and get to your reviews late one day. I would really like it if it stayed.
38 Likes
Why would anyone want this change? I don’t see an upside to doing this.
34 Likes
The intention was to go back to what the timings were intended to be. In the past they were actually the rounded numbers. They were adjusted by reducing an hour due to how we used to evaluate timings. Given we have not evaluated that way anymore we are looking to switch back.
I hope you all can understand the rationale above.
Now given that we have been unaware (and now made aware) of how people are utilizing this free hour I have initiated an internal discussion about this.
Will let you all know when a final verdict has been made.
56 Likes
i saw tweak to timers and was hopeful for a moment. then i saw they don’t really change all that much.
what wk needs more than a 1h shift IMHO is optional additional timers, a proper learning mode with initial drills, and a proper way to address leeches, with comparison mode for similar kanji etc.
never say never i guess… but i won’t hold my breath.
14 Likes
I have been very critical elsewhere on this board of the SRS and glancing at this change I don’t think it does a whole lot to address the problems with the interval timings. Lessons with three reviews the first day is too much early and the reviews are way too spread out later. The spacing does not accomplish what your marketing materials say it does, which is efficient memorization.
But if shaving off that hour means the SRS does not constantly flip reviews from morning to night, then yes, I wholeheartedly support it. Sometimes I think the SRS was written so bots could learn kanji, not human beings who have to do things like sleep and eat and go to work, often at set times. Having review times whipsaw back and forth was the tell that the SRS was designed less to aid my memory than to preserve an arbitrary leveling-up and billing structure.
I mean, I don’t know that it matters to your customers what you all intended the timings to be. What matters is whether it works.
5 Likes
I have no idea what you’re trying to say here. How would shaving off an hour affect whether reviews came in the morning or at night? Just because the intervals don’t work for you doesn’t mean they don’t work for most people. I have a regular work and sleep schedule and the current SRS intervals worked great for me. Lessons at 6PM, first review at 10PM right before bed, second review at 6AM right when I wake up. I don’t see the problem just because you sleep, eat, and work.
10 Likes
The intention as you describe it makes sense, though I always thought the -1 hour was a feature.
I’d also like to offer my experience on how this unintentional free hour helped me out immensely. For most of my time on WaniKani, my schedule was as follows:
- Wednesday 7am - level up
- Wednesday 11am - Apprentice II
- Wednesday 7pm - Apprentice III
- Thursday 6pm - Apprentice IV
- Saturday 5pm - Guru, start with next set of items in level
- Saturday 9pm - Apprentice II
- (Sleep in)
- Sunday 9am - Apprentice III
- Monday 8am - Apprentice IV
- Wednesday 7am - Guru, level up
Rinse and repeat.
The extra hours gave me a ton of flexibility, mainly allowing me to sleep in, otherwise I’d have to wake up early on Sundays to review in order to not shift my schedule. Some other times, I had work meetings on Wednesdays at 11am and could not get to my reviews until noon or later. Knowing that the system had a 2 hour leeway allowed me to not stress out about doing reviews on that exact hour. If I needed to push reviews an hour or two back, I knew my schedule would be back on track within a couple of SRS intervals.
50 Likes
Thank you (and to others) for sharing your use case of having this free hour. It does help us understand.
Will keep you all posted.
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Hi! I just want to add my voice here in agreeing that I am a huge fan of the -1 hour feature. There are some busy days where I get to WaniKani a little late. With the extra hour I can keep myself on track. Without it, if I’m late to reviews on a given night I would have to either stay up later to get them done or put them off until morning. If I wait until morning that’s 8 extra hours between reviews, which can be pretty detrimental for the short-interval (e.g. 1-2 day) reviews. I think that the current timing method is brilliant for flexibility, and may even argue that a -2 hour (e.g. 22 hour, 46 hour etc.) interval system would be even better.
20 Likes
To be clear, when I say the intervals don’t work I mean that the length of the intervals do not work, in particular the later intervals, Guru 2 to Burned. The spacing between reviews is incorrect if the SRS is trying to get people to remember stuff. And yeah, “well it works for some people,” but I’ve seen the chart of how many people quit at each level.
The morning to night thing-- what I have noticed in my own study is that if you are going through this as quickly as possible, sometimes your level-up comes early in the day, some times later in the day. If you kept a really particular schedule maybe you never experienced this. I’ve been trying to go as fast as I can and sometimes my level up is early in the morning, sometimes late at night, sometimes during dinner.
I mean, maybe I screwed it up because even if I knew some Japanese when I started I didn’t know enough Wanikani. I’ve had to install so many scripts and learn so many tricks just to make this app work like it should.
1 Like
Can’t say I’ve cared much about the -1 hour for past guru. But the -1 hour has definitely been helpful for me for 3rd and 4th reviews, helps me align my schedule back to normal if I had to delay past reviews for some reason. Would really suck to see it go.
10 Likes
I don’t really have enough depth about SRS and human psychology to comment on whether or not the intervals are correct or not. I’m sure there are many reasons why people quit ranging from unmotivated to life, but I don’t believe the SRS itself is one of those reasons.
The “going as quickly as possible” is the problem here and your experience is actually an argument for removing that extra hour. I’d like to think of those extra hours as flexibility rather than the absolute time you need to hop on your reviews. You should not be finding yourself randomly up in the middle of the night leveling up (unless that’s what you’re going for). If done “correctly”, you should be leveling up on a specific hour on a given day, giving you exactly a one-week cadence; Fridays at 8am always, for example.
5 Likes
They market the system saying you can finish in a year.
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You can finish in less than a year while keeping a consistent one-week cadence and not lose sleep. For fast levels, that cadence is 3 days 12 hours instead.
4 Likes
Chiming in to say I’m also not a fan of the removal of the 1 hour of breathing room from the 2 stages of guru. When I was doing 7 day levels it gave me just a bit of leeway in the schedule so that even if I missed one of the reviews by an hour I could still catch it back up on the next level or review, and not have the entire schedule drift as a result.
Also, in your table in the original post, you have the “New accelerated interval (hours)” column twice. I assume the first one is just supposed to be “New interval (hours)”
15 Likes
Well, fastest current level up time is 6 days and 20 hours. So if you leveled up at max speed it would become 4 hours earlier every level. Many others maintain a 7 day level up schedule, so they always level up at/around the same time. Don’t know what to tell you.
I agree that having another SRS rank with the intervals a bit shorter would be good. In fact, on Kitusn I made the intervals shorter (though you’re still limited to exactly 9 SRS ranks) because I’ve had similar issues. I don’t know what chart you’re referring to, but that doesn’t prove anything since you can’t know if making the intervals shorter would make things better, worse, or make no difference. Keep in mind that while more ranks and shorter intervals may improve recall, it would result in a larger workload. So it could actually make more people quit for all we know.
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I just want to say thank you for keeping us in the loop and taking our responses into account. I know of very few services where they actually seem to care enough to listen to users.
25 Likes
Y’all this isn’t a race! Have some fun, use the extra hour to enjoy native material or something. I understand that if you’ve been carefully timing everything this may be frustrating but this is about learning a language (and a hard one at that). I think a few extra hours here and there are probably going to help you learn in the long run.
4 Likes
I know I don’t have much room to talk here, but maybe it’s worth only keeping apprentice 3 and and 4’s subtracted hour, and rounding everything else above it up. It seems a lot of people enjoy the leeway of those two hours for catching reviews before work, etc. Especially since those reviews are pretty important to hit within the short intervals, while with the longer reviews it doesn’t matter too much if you’re off by 6-8 hours or so.
8 Likes
I also thought the bonus hour was a feature. I actually thought it was a really nice touch. To me it ensures my reviews pile up consistently at the time when I actually want to do reviews.
Sometimes I’ll take more than an hour which means those last reviews bleed over into the next hour meaning they wont be sitting in the most convenient window for me when they next popup…
21 Likes