Can I find out how many cards I burned per day?

WaniKani
1

I’m trying to decide how many lessons per day are sustainable for me. My current workload feels just right.
I think if I take as many lessons per day as I burn items, this number should be somewhat stable over time.
Is there a way for me to find out how many cards I burned per day over the last N days?

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That used to be possible with the review API…

Now I think that the best estimate would be to go there: https://www.wanikani.com/burned-items

Divide the number by thirty and you’ll get the average over the past month.

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That’s exactly how I DO do it, works pretty well.

Yes, if, like any metric for a variable thing, you don’t over-react to small variations. Because of the 4-month time delay, you run the risk of reacting to something you’ve already corrected.

Many years ago, one of the machines I had to know how to operate was a water distilling plant. Turned out I was one of only a few people who could do it well. The trick was, it reacted to changes verrrrryyyyy slowwwwwly. If some gage read lower than it should, I could tweak a valve maybe another 1/8 turn open. Nothing would obviously happen. What most people would do is impatiently open it another 1/8, then another 1/8, until they saw some response. By that time the valve was way too far open and when the machine started responding to that… it crashed. It took patience, memory (of what you did), and faith (that it would work) to run that machine.

All that to say I think 30-day burn count is about as good a metric as it gets, but controlling it is more like that distilling plant than a car throttle pedal.

Summary

I actually use a combination of that and “excess guru”, which is how many items I have in Guru, minus the amount I think should ideally be there. That’s a rough measure of my failure rate. And I don’t control by changing the lesson rate, I either spend more time or less paying attention to the mnemonics in lessons and/or reviewing items with the self-study script between reviews. It’s subjective maybe, but I find that lowering my failure rate has a quicker and more broad-reaching effect than slowing down the machine.

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