I’ve been on and off WaniKani with my final year of university drawing most of my time but now that Im finished I can say with certainty that setting a specific time (3 times a day) to do reviews has worked wonders for me. I do 7am, 11am, 7pm (just finished) 
- and although im waking up to 152 reviews tomorrow, ill get the chance to do my seconds et at 11am just before work and then a set just after I finish. This isnt always the case as my work is part time and thus different each week, but if you want to send what time you usually work I can help out as much as I can! If you’re in part time work like me, set your hours around your schedule (not just wani kani schedule) - its a life changer for productivity!
How is your understanding of Japanese going? It can be discouraging to get low review scores but the goal of this is to understand the Japanese language, not burn items as quickly as possible. Maybe focus on reading or listening or other areas if you aren’t already?
I think for me, it averages out to 1 minute per review because when I miss it, it comes around again later. I don’t stare at an item for more than a few seconds. But if I don’t know it, I read what it was (which also doesn’t take very long), and sometimes make a note to myself or compare it to whatever I had mixed it up with–which is apparently where the time reeps in, I guess.
It just ends up taking an average of 1 minute per item.
When I timed it back when I used wanikani, 100 reviews took about 17 minutes for me.
I guess my question would be how much time and effort you are putting into your lessons. Those seemed to be the biggest predictor of how well I would retain an item. The better the retention, the faster and better the reviews.
As a general rule of thumb, I would try to make sure I had my lessons down good enough to where I could tell you the items meaning/reading a couple days later without any reviewing necessary. That’s the level of initial memory commitment I would shoot for.
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That’s impressive.
I’m not a native English speaker, so I have an extra layer both when I study the meaning and the reading. Sometimes readings or meaning are not that easy to remember and I need to do an extra effort, like writing them down or inventing a new story to try to recall the English bit. For example I’m not using words like “cushy” or “boisterous” or “house of representative” often (actually, I never used them before WK and I’m using them only in WK context), so when I need to review those meaning/reading I haven’t seen in 1 month or 3 months, it is not easy, it takes time, and if I wait enough for my neurotransmitters to get the info, it might pass 1 minute or so. Often I watch the kanji/vocab I need to review, then I distract myself with other stuff for a bunch of seconds (or minutes) and then the reading/meaning is popping out in my mind.
In the apprentice stage, instead, the reading and meaning are 95-100% immediate and I can do 30 reviews in probably 5-7 minutes effortlessly.
When I was studying how a SRS works, I learned that it needs to ask you just before you’re forgetting. So that’s why I hypothesized that the longer intervals are not working for me in particular.
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ah that probably has a decent impact.
I don’t know if I agree with the idea that the longer intervals “don’t work for you”. I think its just as much the individual working to meet the srs intervals. I think you’re on the right track for sure by making new stories and stuff, but have you done other stuff perhaps to limit distractions, increase focus, and consider adding definitions/synonyms in your own native language? I also had a habit of reviewing each individual item I got wrong after the review session one by one on the results screen and ensuring I would get it next time.
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Thank you for your suggestions.
I tried to block out distractions with brown noise and it usually makes the review session flowing better, if I’m not too tired.
Ideally, if I can shorten the review time, I should have some more time to do some extra reviews to increase my retention.
I will meditate about it. Thank you again!
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Have you guys been through this as well?
yeah but i just gave up and let my subscription run out, that was quite a while ago. now i’m back with a huge mountain of reviews (i assume atleast, still waiting for the paypal invoice).
think everyone else hits the nail on the head, better to go slow and get there eventually than going hard and crashing.
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For me personally, I have been zooming and just pressing correct on all my kanji reviews to pass to the next level since march this year due to college, and since late march, I have been studying every day
I had 2000 reviews pilled up then, and now have gotten it down to 0 with 300-600 reviews a day. I did death stacks of kanji 50-140 flash cards to make mnemonics which seems to help me get them faster and recognize them over similar looking kanji. I do also have 2226 vocab lessons to do. I have advanced from lvl 28 which I was then and achieved after 1 year.
I am devoting the time, and slowing down to hone in on them to nail them until I get them correct.
I am in the exact same boat at the moment. I know that the main advice that people give is to wait until your Apprentice score gets low before doing new lessons, but I seem to have a large number of leeches and items that swing back and forth between Guru and Apprentice without getting burned. I’ve tried reviewing and installing the leech trainer app, and I have been holding off on new lessons.
I’ve been trying to do more and more reading, hoping to solidify the 1060 or so kanji that WK says I already know. I definitely recognize a lot of the kanji I see in manga and novels for elementary school kids, as well as NHK news (the easy version).
One thing I did was to print out all of WaniKani - can’t remember who here in the community posted it, but you should be able to find it with a search. I sent the file to a local print shop and got it spiral bound - I find it really helpful to be able to look at the past levels and refresh my memory. I am also trying to look ahead and get some kind of preliminary idea of the remaining levels, so that I am not hitting them completely cold when I get to them.
I also get 200+ or so reviews a day, but I am wondering at this point if the best approach might be to just start trying to barrel through the remaining levels, until I reach a point where the reviews become too much. If I could make it to level 40 or so before another slowdown period, and then sprint to the finish line, maybe that would be the way to go. The SRS really works, in terms of showing you an item again and again until you finally get it.
For me, it turns out to be about a minute per review to clear. So 2 hours for a hundred-ish reviews is typical for me. I’m a pretty smart person, and I go “pretty fast” through my reviews… at about 70% accuracy (less on days of new material). But a stack of “60 reviews” means that I’m engaging with over 100 views to clear.
I type pretty fast. I take notes and think and look at the kanji, read the notes and hints of I screw up; look up the thing I got it confused with…But don’t spend more than 30 seconds looking at anything. It is what it is.
I’ve gotten through 39 levels of Wanikani in a year and a half. It takes a while.
By this do you mean holding off learning new kanji until you have decreased the number of items you have in the apprentice level?
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Yes, exactly. I sometimes go weeks without taking on any new lessons at all. But, as I said in the last post, that can lead to a different kind of lack of motivation, since you feel like you aren’t moving forward. I’m currently trying to do a few lessons every few days.
Yes I agree with this. Bottom line is… this journey is a marathon. And it often pays to shuffle your focus from time to time if that means you can remain consistent.
Right now I’m on a bit of break. I’m only doing reviews on the weekend and turing on vacation mode in between because I’m prepping for the JLPT. It honestly feels pretty great.
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