I do them, but I don’t really like them. To me they feel like tests and it bothers me quite a lot, when I make mistakes at reviews When I’m having a bad day and make a few unnecessary mistakes, I get so frustrated that I completely lose focus and make even more mistakes.
Sometimes, when I think an answer is right at the tip of my tongue, I keep thinking until I get it instead of just admitting that I didn’t knew it fast enough and type something wrong in order to learn the vocabulary again.
I don’t really think that there’s a right and wrong way since we all have slightly different ways of learning. Still I just started to wonder if I should try a completely different approach. Maybe I should try to do all reviews as fast as possible and try my best not to bother all too much about making some mistakes and getting items downgraded.
I’d appreciate if you could take the time to tell me about your way of approaching the reviews.
How many of you have the time to do reviews more than once a day?
I think that the best approach to reviews – is to treat them not as test of how well you’ve prepared, but rather as diagnostics of which part of your knowledge you need to strenghten.
Failing a review doesn’t mean you are at fault – it just means that particular item is harder for you to remember, which is why the system would then give you that item more often!
I’ve stopped doing reviews once I’ve reached level 60, but on my final streak from level 40+ to level 60, I usually I did all the radical and kanji lessons at once and then also did about 10 vocab lessons per day. I don’t remember how much reviews that resulted per day, but it was manageable. At least, much more manageable than doing all the available lessons at once and then have them all come back at once as reviews
Anyway, reviews might get quite annoying, but it’s an important routine core. For language learning – it’s essential to study every day, even if only a bit. Studying half an hour every day is better than not studying all week and then doing 8 hours on Sunday, even though the latter technically has more studying hours per week. Because it’s important to keep reminding our brains that Japanese is important and we need to keep it in memory!
I mean, to be completely clear, the win condition here is not “get everything to Burned”, but rather “learn Japanese”. Getting a card wrong is a still step on that path, so it’s also winning, even if it feels bad… man.
I like doing reviews. I do them somewhat quickly, but I’ll take a few moments to try to recall items that are on the tip of my tongue when warranted. I don’t worry very much about genuine memory failures, in the grand scheme of things. I let the item fail so that I keep seeing it frequently, and if it just keeps failing, I may take a little time to mentally tweak a mnemonic or remind myself how a vocabulary item is used in context.
I have a lot of life things going on, but I take the time to do reviews multiple times throughout the day. I personally find this to be less stressful. The time that I have during the day is always just downtime between tasks. I do daytime reviews like someone who enjoys sudoku might take out a puzzle. If I only have time to get through a couple of reviews while I wait for a train to arrive (or whatever), that’s perfectly fine. If I have more time than expected, and I can zero my reviews during the day, that’s even better. If I would rather use my spare moments to watch birds instead of look at Wanikani, then that’s what I do. Hakuna matata.
I always zero my remaining reviews in the evening, before I do any lessons. Or at least, that’s what I’ve done thusfar… We’ll see if that can be maintained. Sometimes watching はじめてのおつかい (or whatever is capturing my attention) is higher priority to me than Wanikani… then I’m up far too late later doing a few lessons.
I made the mistake early on of thinking I needed to get all my reviews perfect, and for the first few levels or so I’d back out and go back in if I got a particularly punishing review downgrade incorrect. But when you do that, you’re robbing yourself because if you forget it now, you certainly will struggle at a later SRS stage. In my case, I paid dearly for almost all of those cheated reviews and they all became leeches I had to clear out slowly and painfully.
I prefer to treat reviews like a big sieve into the brain nowadays: Over the long term, if you’re learning your mnemonics properly you’re likely to maintain somewhere in the neighborhood of 85-95% accuracy on your reviews. This means on a long enough time scale you’ll burn everything if you just keep at it. The ones you get wrong just didn’t slide cleanly into your brain the first time and need more care, but you’ll get them eventually if you keep coming back.
And over the course of doing WK, you’re going to learn so much damn content that whether you remembered any one specific item when your final burn came due for that item simply won’t matter if you have to do it again. So just be honest with yourself, embrace the failures, and get to the cake at the end of the rainbow, is my personal opinion.
For me, I’m on the speed run schedule, so learning every kanji I unlock as soon as I unlock it means I’m virtually guaranteed to remember less than 25% of them on the first Apprentice stage. so I’m more than used to the big angry red bar now
