Can there please be an option to cap the number of reviews?

I’m not a full time student. I’ve been doing these reviews everyday for years. I’m getting to a point where I’m getting fatigue from handling the leeches. I’d like to be able to focus more on grammar but even with anki mode, the 200-300 reviews will not calm down. I finish them and suddenly 80+ have popped up and even if I had time and did those, it doesn’t reduce tomorrows numbers. They’re getting to be a bit of a pest. I would never have been able to continue doing these if I had to manually type them. I did those in my level 20’s and those took almost 4 hours.

I can’t knock them all out at lunch and when I get home, there are just as many, if not more reviews back than when I started so I sometimes have to leave the session running.

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Capping the number of reviews directly is counter to how SRS works. I think what WaniKani needs more (which would probably help you) is being able to suspend items so reviews for those items no longer show up. You could then suspend all of your leeches so they don’t drag you down. In the grand scheme of things, if you suspend 500 items you’re still learning a ton.

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How are you handling your lessons? Slowing down on your lessons might be one way to manage your reviews.

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Unfortunately if you accumulate enough leeches, you eventually will have a ton of reviews even if you don’t do any lessons.

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I really wish there was a suspend feature. There are some kanji/vocab that just won’t stick (especially intransitive vs transitive) and I feel like I would rather just encounter them while reading rather than trying to cram them in my head over and over and getting frustrated.

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Capping the number of reviews will do more harm than good, honestly.

Before doing WaniKani I had inadvertently had my Anki stuff setup that way and I eventually got to a point where I couldn’t remember hardly anything. Items that should come up after X amount of time wind up getting pushed off and by the time you see them again you’ve completely forgotten them.

So the question is, how do we get your daily review count down. Presumably you’ve stopped taking on new lessons so you can flush out as much of the Apprentice and Guru stuff you have in queue, yes? If not, now would be a good time to do so.

If there are so many leeches that just those on their own are hundreds of reviews a day… that’s a pretty major issue and something to address.

I find that being frustrated with leeches and just trying to ram them in your brain, tends to not work. With stuff I’ve struggled and get mixed up, next time I see them I take a deep breath and make a fresh assessment of them. Looking at two similar words that I confuse and finding some clue difference to look for. Thinking of some new mnemonic for them. Whatever it takes. Just putting off new lessons and going on a leech hunt.

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That seems really inefficient to me on the whole. Why spend so much time learning a few hundred tough items when you could learn a lot more new items instead? I think it would be better to set those leeches aside (if you struggle with them for months and months) and just relearn them when you see them in the real world.

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It is good time to reset for you imo.
ıt will ease the pain and heal your wounds.

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I have mixed feelings on it.

On one hand I certainly have plenty of leeches which I wish I could just defer to a later date, as you say. At the same time though, if someone has accumulated so many leeches that it’s hundreds of reviews a day just from that… seems like an indication of a more fundamental issue. Like maybe that’s a time to take a step back and re-assess things - learning process, mnemonics, whatever it might be.

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Truth. Ultimate Timeline pretty much always says ~250 in next 24 hours for me. And with a accuracy rate of ~60%, even doing no lessons, this hell will never let up.

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I agree to an extent, but I was never able to make a significant dent in my leeches and it was too exhausting to drill them or come up with new approaches.

A few months after I finished level 60 on WaniKani, I was still getting a lot of reviews daily (not hundreds, but it was a lot for me). This became overwhelming (or rather, I should say I was still overwhelmed when I had hoped things would get easier at this point) so I put WaniKani in vacation mode and haven’t used it since. That was about a year ago. It’s really unfortunate because I wish I could have reviewed the last 10 levels of content more and tried to burn more. But when leeches represented well over half my reviews I realized it wasn’t worth it anymore.

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Just set a personal cap, try doing 100 reviews a day and no more. If that’s too much, try doing 90 the following day. If too few, try 110. This is not a problem that has to be solved by an algorithm.

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I see you’ve dug up quite a hole for yourself with 300 apprentice items. I would maybe look at resetting a few levels if a lot of those items are from those levels. Another option would be to use the reorder review script to slowly try to get the critical ones upward.

I also agree with some other posters that it’s a good idea to take a step back. Really the more I did other things outside of WK for Japanese the easier it became as I got new associations and reinforcement. So balancing is key.

@seanblue Agree a 100% about those leeches. Some items have been in my queue for over 6 months and it’s quite clear I won’t learn them through WK. It’s just some English word association that I can’t get get down. Better to learn it in the wild. Often those words aren’t very common either. I’ve actually started intentionally “drowning myself” a bit in vocab on floflo because some words stick incredibly well. If you are able to learn so many words who cares if I get some leeches. I just delete them. Not gonna learn them through SRS anyway. Perfection(ism) is the enemy of good language learning.

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Easy come, easy go is the SRS way…

They really need a suspend feature. I’ve been studying Japanese for 3 years prior to starting WaniKani and so many words and kanji are just taking up time and effort. I don’t need to burn the first 10 levels because I already knew all the kanji and vocabulary… WaniKani really doesn’t appeal to people who have already studied Japanese before. Lack of customization is bad for the consumer. I’m paying but I can’t get a simple suspend feature. Their “method” only appeals to new Japanese learners.

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WaniKani really does appeal to me, and I have already studied Japanese before.

Their method appeals to me, and I am not a new Japanese learner.

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I always think, that if you really know the material well it won’t be a large amount of work to get through it. Sure, it’ll be a bit slow in the beginning but it’s a good, unbiased test to see if you actually know what you think you do :woman_shrugging:

I’ve personally started and stopped studying Japanese for around 10 years and I always come back to WK to start. I’m definitely still a beginner because I haven’t really retained anything over the years. But I never get annoyed when I know a kanji or vocab, because it’s so easy to just… do it and move on.

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When it’s time to burn items, they take a tremendous amount of time and effort, regardless if you know them or not. What happens is that you’re loaded with 200 reviews every 2-3 days. I took N4 the first time and passed last year, therefore I’d like to start from level 10 or something. I like their method, I just don’t like their “absolute” view. Honestly, it seems like they intentionally disable features to keep you paying more money in the long run. My main point is that more options are always better for the consumer and we pay for this service.

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I feel like I’m leaning more towards @jerseytom’s point of view. I think that leeches are inevitable and have a few dozen isn’t a big deal, but once you have more than a hundred there’s definitely something more fundamental going on.

I can see @seanblue’s point that dwelling on them is allocating time better spent elsewhere, but I really do think that an excessive number is something that, when addressed, will provide more long term gains.

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If it feels like a chore doing WK reviews , maybe it’s time to consume authentic japanese content and look up kanji as you go, would be my suggestion.

I have not reached lv 20 myself but I really enjoy doing reviews and do them every 2-3 hours while I am awake. I do about 1 review every 2 seconds while keeping it over 90%.

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