I’m totally fine with the long wait periods between reviews since I supplement this with other resources, but I’ve noticed you get severely penalized if you make an error (at least at level 1).
I had a typo in one of the kanji readings early on, and now my reviews seem to be skewed. I’ll finish up, and it’ll say my next review is in 8 hours, but after that wait I’m simply reviewing one kanji. After reviewing the one kanji, it’s another 6 hour wait.
Does the system simply not behave well at lower levels, or is this intentional? I’m hazarding a guess that later on each review is filled in a little better.
It’s easy to think about this small stuff when you’re level 1 and you have only a few items No worries, it won’t bother you that much when you get 1000+ items cycling through your reviews.
Yeah, what jprspereira said, plus: the penalty is not very severe by comparison. You want to fail now at apprentice and have to wait hours, not fail later and have to wait weeks. You won’t mind the short wait when you get all the review streams of the various SRS level items coming at you all the time. It’s just noticeable now.
And it’s not a “penalty”! It’s an opportunity to strengthen that memory. Sometimes the words you use to think about it can affect your attitude and enjoyment.
The items do pile up pretty quickly as you level up. Soon you won’t notice how long it takes a item to come back up for review because you already have lots of other reviews and lessons to do.
That’s just how SRS works. The goal is to make you pull out items from memory just as you’re about to forget them, and to achieve that it makes you wait a bit. The more you get them right, the longer the wait times become. It’s slow now because there just aren’t that many items, but later on the older Guru/Master/Enlightened items sprinkle in to fill the wait times between your new Apprentices. And by sprinkle I mean it can also be a tsunami depending on how fast you go.
As for the typos, check out the Ignore script on the Ultimate List of Scripts page. You can deck out your WK experience to your heart’s content.
It should also be noted that the SRS system is intended to work in a vacuum. It might be tempting to study the kanji you’ve learned outside of your reviews, but don’t do it. The space between reviews is there to put the kanji into your long term memory, and if you complete a review because you’ve put it back in your short-term memory, you’ve defeated the point. That’s when you want to get it wrong so it can more thoroughly plant itself into your head. It’s not a penalty, it’s a part of learning.
A quick note that this doesn’t apply to practicing reading when you get that far. Like NHK easy news, graded readers, etc. Thats the only way you will be able to take anything out of wanikani.
No worries, it won’t bother you that much when you get 1000+ items cycling through your reviews.