Easy reviews are taking up most of my study time

WaniKani
1

I really like WaniKani and I’ve learned a lot here, but I often feel like quitting because I don’t think I’m using my study time efficiently enough.

I’ve been using WK for a few months. At first, I did my reviews as soon as they became available, but eventually I switched to doing one review session per day. This increased my average level-up time quite a bit, but I don’t really mind that.

During my last two levels, though, I ended up sabotaging myself a bit. I focused on radicals and kanji so I could level up faster, which left me with a huge backlog of vocabulary lessons. I think skipping so much vocabulary also made it harder for me to retain the kanji properly. I’ve now decided to stay at my current level until I finish all of the vocabulary lessons I’m missing.
But that’s just context, the real issue has been with how long it takes me to get through all my reviews.

Most of the items in my review sessions feel very easy, but I still end up spending around an hour a day reviewing them. It feels worse when I have a radical, kanji, and vocabulary item that all have the same meaning and reading.

Sometimes I go several days without doing any new lessons because I don’t want to increase my review count, even though my accuracy is consistently above 95%. I’ve tried doing 15-25 new items per day before, and I know I can handle that with around 90-95% accuracy at that pace, but it increases the review time so much it feels like an inefficient use of my time.
When a new lesson contains an item I already know well, instead of being happy that it will be easy, I feel frustrated because I know I’ll have to spend time reviewing something I already know. This bothers me even more when I realize that I’m spending more time reviewing easy items on WK than studying grammar or getting immersion. I think having a way to mark an item as easy or already learned, or maube using something like FSRS, would help a lot with this problem.

I haven’t used the Anki Mode script because I feel that typing the answers helps me retain them better, but I think I may try it before giving up on WK entirely.

I still really like WaniKani, especially how it teaches radicals and uses mnemonics. But lately I’ve kind of been using it more like a dictionary: whenever I run into a new kanji or vocab word elsewhere, I just look it up on WK and use the mnemonics to help me remember it.

Has anyone else felt this way? Did you find a way to make WaniKani feel more efficient without giving it up?

2

I definitely identify with what you’re going through, more on the feeling that WK isn’t the best use of my time. I often would feel overwhelmed with the sheer amount of vocabulary that I had to get through in order to learn new kanji (I like to 100% a level before moving on). What I found was that in my pursuit to do a lot all at once it ended up making me just not want to do it. Sure, I could learn 10 new items a day, that would put me at a great pace, but what ends up happening is that 10 number sounds long and daunting and I just don’t do it.

What I have started doing is studying just 1 new kanji a day, alongside 2 new vocab words. That has been really great for me because I feel like I give each kanji it’s own day to solidify in my brain, while also chipping away at vocab. Doing 1 kanji a day is better than doing none haha.
Not only does this method help me actually learn new kanji, it frees up my time to go study in other ways, such as listening to a podcast, studying grammer, or just watching something on youtube.

In regards to you wanting to skip things you already know or that are easy for you. I’ll say this, Japanese is all about pattern recognition, so the more you see those easy words, the longer they will be engrained in your head. They might be easy now, but if they aren’t used routinely they may be forgotten and become hard words later on.

I definitely understand the desire to progress fast, but sometimes that hurts in the long run.
頑張れ！

3

The kakehashi app has an anki mode which may cut down your review time. The app has a bunch of other features that make reviews more bearable. If you have lifetime, you can make reviews more manageable by reducing the number of lessons you do. Around level 30 I went down to 9 lessons a day, at least 6 of which are vocab. I don’t see the point in cramming unless you need a jlpt cert for a job. Speed-running seems to backfire for most people.

But if you haven’t purchased lifetime, I think it’s a fair move to quit if you have other resources that are more appealing to you.

4

This is great advice. To read comfortably you’ll want to be able to immediately recognize words without really processing them. The reviews can feel tedious when they’re preventing you from learning new words, but slamming through a sequence of cards on autopilot and getting them all correct is a great feeling and ultimately the goal. It takes repetition to get to that point, unfortunately, but SRS and strict typing requirements are the quickest way to get that exposure.

I think that this is true too. The vocab are often chosen to reinforce the kanji rather than because they’re particularly useful words to know at an early stage. I think of them more as an extension of the kanji lessons, so cutting out that stage of the radical > kanji > vocabulary loop can make the lesson feel incomplete.

My advice is to trust the system! The review spacing is not arbitrary, and even though it can feel like overkill, you’ll only have to answer correctly 8 or 9 times to move something from new to burned. It certainly adds up, but in the grand scheme of language learning, checking a flash card 10 times is not much, and the SRS + active typing really multiplies the effect. 頑張れ！

5

I think part of your problem might be doing one review session per day. New items start on a 4 hour timer, then 8hr, 12hr, 24hr, and 48hr. Then they stretch out to a week (guru lvl 1). By doing one review session each day you’re letting everything with a timer less than 48 hours stack into a single session. That can be an awful lot especially if you consistently do new lessons.

I don’t know your schedule, but if you can squeeze in a morning and evening review session you’ll move those items up into the longer timers faster which will shorten your review sessions.

What works for me is doing a session at 8am, noon, (sometimes also 4 pm), and 8 pm. That way any new item quickly moves up to guru where I see it less.

Also if your reviews are seeming to be too much or taking too much of your study time, hold off on new lessons until you get over the hump. Then start back up at fewer lessons per day and you should be able to get back on track.

6

I strongly agree with this, and potentially even a mid-day session if possible. I hit burnout early on when I was only doing 1-2 review sessions a day, especially being on here and on Bunpro at the same time. The easy fix for me was to do smaller batches more often. A benefit (for me) to the small, frequent batch method is that it feels like it takes up way less of my time each day when I just check in once per hour and knock out 5-10 reviews in just a couple of minutes and go back to what I was doing. I’ve almost finished getting my review times re-trained to this new schedule and it has felt great.

As far as reviews per day is concerned, I’m consistently maintaining an average of ~150 reviews per day because I’m doing them so frequently throughout my day. At the same time though, I get real frustrated sitting down at the end of the night and doing more than 30 reviews at at time (like for example, after a socially busy day). So when I know I’m gonna be busy, I’ll dial it back a little on lessons and try to squeak in reviews wherever I can.

It’s good to hear you point this out. I was thinking about doing this very thing starting on level 11. I’ve been trying to get through levels just a little faster, but it sounds like that’s just going to cause trouble, so I’ll just stick to lessons in the order they’re dealt.

7

Always use the lesson picker and never add a lesson you already know for starters ?

8

Just to cut against what you are saying and speak to the heart of the matter, I would humbly suggest that a better perspective is: no effort is wasted :slight_smile:

WaniKani takes a minimum of about one year, which for me is a scale of time on which efficient use of time is kind of difficult to really think about. For example, if you decide to go slower (increasing the total number of days that you are not at level 60), paradoxically you wind up having more time in each of those days that you are not yet at level 60, which is arguably an efficiency gain, if you squint.

9

My main source of frustration is that I can realisticly only learn 5 items per day which includes only 1 kanji. for 2100 kanji, this will take me 6 years if I don’t quit earlier.

10

  1. Try to do wanikani twice per day - after you just woke up in the morning and 1-2 hours before you go to bed at night

  2. Review all mistakes twice

  3. Did you change the max amount of reviews and lessons in the account settings yet?

11

i guess nothing is really stopping you from literally using wanikani as a dictionary… browsing new kanji/vocab one level at a time, reading the mnemonics, but pulling all the items into an anki deck where you can customize the srs timings to delay easy items longer

12

I’d second the 2 reviews per day. For me, seems like a nice pace, though I’ll occasionally do more if I have downtime. But definitely at least once in morning and once evening.

I also was doing lessons as they came up, but recently became untenable. Decide how many reviews are reasonable for you, and only do new lessons to keep your upcoming schedule within that range. For me, that’s around 100 reviews, but hard capped around 200. That’s like 2.5 hour max if full of stuff I’m getting wrong… but generally keeping around 100-130.

i think front loading radicals, then kanji, then vocab is still a good idea. This because, kanji will help cement the radical meanings, vocabs will help cement the kanji readings. Getting stuff unlocked to create this support structure can help speed up reviews and increase accuracy. Always used advanced lesson option.

As for “easy” stuff eating up time… I’m not sure what you mean. I think if it takes more than a few seconds to type in an answer it’s probably not easy. When I think easy, it’s like instant recall, type in 2-3 seconds, move on. (Though typos are a pain). Closing app to “undo” some reviews to not let a type screw you is maybe a dangerous thing…gotta use strictly for typos and not “oh, man I knew that!”

tldr:

2 review sessions per day; control number of reviews; use advanced lesson picker; easy should be fast+confident

Mostly talking out my ass as a level 8, but this what’s working for me rn