I’ve just started BunPro and kamesame to supplement my learning, when wanikani is being too quiet, but I recently wondered, while going through the wanikani vocabs in kamesame:
Does learning/repeating guru or master items in another app mess up the SRS effect? Going from master to enlightened, for example should take 2 months or so, but if I practice an item 2 weeks before that in another app, does enlightened really mean the same thing now?
Wondering if you guys ever thought about that, or maybe experienced it interfering more, than helping.
Essentially though, no, there’s no harm. Wanikani’s SRS is the most efficient way to learn, requiring the least amount of time put in, but there’s no harm in studying externally or doing other SRS systems.
Personally, I put failed items in to a separate SRS deck in Kitsun.io so that I can double reinforce, for example
We don’t learn in a vacuum, so it’s impossible to not interfere – even in Wanikani, you might fail one vocab item with a given kanji in it, and pass all the other ones with that kanji in it thanks to that one failed item
SRS gives us a minimum number of exposures to a thing in a certain time frame to be able to memorise the thing efficiently. But as described in MegaZeroX’s post that Joeni posted, there’s no actual harm in seeing things elsewhere – in daily life contexts like reading or walking around in Japan, or synthetic ones like other SRS
From what I remember looking into the research on this, it doesn’t actually matter all that much what the interval of the items you’re learning is in SRS, just that they are spaced out. So if there’s still quite a bit of time between reviews, you should be okay and the system is working, so to speak.