It’s better in the long run to stagger them throughout the day. If you can’t do set times, then just find spots in your routine to fit in 10-15 minutes. Use the wrap-up feature or just end the review if you have to.
I’ll usually do mine around my morning coffee, sometime during lunch, and sometime before or after I make dinner.
This has the added advantage of feeling like less work. After doing 100+ reviews in a session before I had to rethink things, doing 30 or so items at a time seems so much easier even if the daily total is still 100+.
This is a new level week, so the bump of 40/19/17 between 8am and 11am are from the lessons I did at the beginning of the week coming around again for Apprentice 3 and Apprentice 4.
So on the schedule I posted above, I’ll probably do around 60 at 9am or whenever I have my morning coffee/breakfast. That’ll take only 20m or so since these are items I’ve been doing the whole week and my accuracy should be pretty good with them.
By lunchtime, I’ll only have around 30 to do. And at dinner, around 10 or so. So it’s pretty easy to get through them all.
I haven’t done a lesson since January, also, hitting 500 reviews in a day is just not do-able for me. Even if it was, the problem is that 500 reviews would be fine if I could get 80%+ of them right, but when you’re playing catch up and 40% is a good score, then they come back at you really fast.
40% is really bad. Since incorrect items move down at least two SRS levels you need to be getting at least 66% just to make forward progress.
If you aren’t consistently scoring better than 70%, you need to step back and think about how to improve your retention or you will just spin your wheels indefinitely. See my post above for advice about using the mnemonics and getting them to stick.
I think resetting a few levels could help a lot in your case too – you need to re-boot those levels for which your extended vacation screwed the early SRS timings. I would consider down-leveling until your apprentice count is under 100.
This might not be the most popular method, but it really worked for me:
Last year I:
Stopped doing lessons
Installed the Ultimate Reorder script, set my reviews to be grouped by levels
Used the script to only work on levels 1-10 for about 3 months. Completely ignored my review count (around 600 I think) and only worked on levels 1-10.
Once most items from levels 1-10 were burned, took another 3 months to burn most items from levels 10-15 (a lot of leeches in this bracket).
Another 3 months for 15-24
3 months for all the horrible leeches from 1-24 (still working on about 200 of them).
This way I didn’t have to reset (which I really did not want to do). Yup, it took a year, but now I have about 20-30 reviews a day without using scripts and 3000+ items burned. And I don’t hate opening WK anymore
Also, I was struggling with 40% accuracy as well. By limiting my levels, the SRS kicked in and I was re-seeing items I struggled with more often instead of when I would randomly get around to doing 500 reviews.
The only time I saw review queues like that were after non vacation mode breaks of months (years) and then after a small level reset, studying through 2k reviews and getting half wrong. It stayed hellish 400 reviews minimum a day for roughly 3 weeks until I had got everything to guru 2. Then… the backside where I had 50ish a day of only a few leaches and time for leveling. If you have dying on leaches, cheat know them to master then worry about them later. If those items are radicals… you need to study more as without them, you have no shot at the kanjis based on them. Or you need to reset back to a level where things are Known and go from there.
That’s why they call the 30s Hell.
If you focus and get over this hump it seems to normalize.
Dealing with leeches is a huge pain in the butt though.
You have two options:
1: Make a special anki deck/flashcards/notebook that have all the kanji you deem to be a leech. Review those specially. I did this with some of my worst leeches and I successfully destroyed a good percent of them. Leeches are one of the worst parts of this system, I can’t understand why they just won’t stick in the brain!
2: For leeches, unimportant, or words that are too difficult for you now:
change the alternate meaning to “leech”. This will cure their english meaning in case you can’t recall that. You will still have to remember the Japanese reading though, unfortunately.
I do this method for all radicals because they generally don’t help me in my personal learning process and I don’t want them bringing me down.
This is a learning process, and though it is gamified, there is no cheating. Do whatever you want.
You could also consider going back some levels, but that is kind of a pain.
Both good bits of advice, there’s a leech trainer script for (1).
For (2) you could change the synonym to “F” to save on typing.
There’s also a super-useful script that automatically fills in the radicals, WaniKani Autofill Radicals that I wish I had discovered on Day 1 since I learned the radicals/mnemonics from Heisig and don’t like WK’s versions.
Either reset down 10-15 levels, or just don’t do any lessons for the next 3-6 months and only do reviews. That amount of reviews is going to stay that way for a long time until you get your learning under control.
It’s not a race to level up.
When things are back to normal, if you feel like you have time for more reviews, do 10-15 lessons that day. If you feel like you have more than enough reviews in a day, just let your lessons sit there. If you keep pushing yourself to do all of the lessons when they appear, you’re just going to dig a hole and bury yourself in it.
I’m assuming that you either did all of your lessons immediately, or reorderd learned the kanji really quick, neglected the vocab, and they piled up on you and you had to learn too many at once.
Edit: Not that the above is what you should do, but it is what I would do in your situation.
That summarizes it how I meant to earlier. WaniKani seems to have too much of a potential to consume time up to the point where it can be your entire day if you’re not careful. I fully understand this is up to the user and not biting off more than you can chew but I would enjoy a mode that cut the SRS intervals in half (Though there may be a good reason they are what they are) so time can be managed for Grammar and many other pieces of the pie. I’ve spent far too long only doing this and Bunpo when it’s now probably time I do more lessons and more real time learning with JA Sensei and Animelon.
And forget a lot less. They should cut the vocab list by a couple thousand and shank down some of the SRS intervals and they’d have a lot fewer threads like this.
I meant for that to be a toggle with a disclaimer for when having to stay on top of WaniKani is getting more in the way of leaning Japanese in general. Last thing I want is to affect anyone else for my niche situation
