Grinding reviews. Study technique

Hi everyone. I feel sometimes I am just grinding reviews, getting them wrong time after time until they eventually stick. I was wondering what other people do to learn? Would anyone recommend writing the example sentences down or anything?

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I’ve had the same issues sometimes. There’s a few things I recommend doing.

  1. Do all your reviews as close to the SRS intervals as you can. They’re set how they are because that’s what’s been found to be the most effective.

  2. Spend more time on your lessons. Instead of quickly pushing through, spend a little bit of time saying the reading and meaning to yourself and checking if you’re right. If you read through it a few times, instead of just 1, it will help them stick.

  3. Space out your lessons. Trying to learn a lot of things at the same time will reduce your accuracy. Do lessons at a rate that is comfortable and you’ll have less to remember. Your accuracy should be higher when you’re doing a smaller number of lessons at once.

Even though WK is a curated system, you still need to figure out what works best for you. Trying a few different things is a good idea so you can really hone in on an effective strategy.

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One thing I’ve tried that’s helpful is using BishBashBosh to study/cram the items I’ve recently gotten wrong after a review session.
http://jptools.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/bishbashbosh.html

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On my first run through of a lesson, I spend maybe a minute or two with the reading and meaning to try and get it to stick. If it’s kanji I’ve already learned that are being used in a compound word that makes sense or something easy to remember then it’s more like 10-15 seconds.

The main thing is to make sure you’re able to make the first review of those items in 4 hours. For this reason, I’ll only do lessons in the morning or early afternoon.

On the first review, I find that there are items that I can remember easily and others that I just blank on. For the latter, I spend a bit more time on the piece I missed during the review, i.e. the reading, the meaning, the mnemonic, etc. Sometimes I’ll adjust the mnemonic to something that works better for me.

After that, I just let the SRS do its thing and stop worrying about it. As the reviews come back around again, there are usually less and less items that I need to reinforce.

Rinse and repeat until the next level.

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Thanks for the tips, they have really helped

G’day everyone!

I am now on level 5. For the first 4 levels I did exactly what @pompomstu did, relying on my short-term memory; eventually I got it right, but this took a long time and became semi-frustrating, not to mention taking a huge amount of time to get through a level.

I decided I couldn’t continue this way as I am trying to learn as much as possible by July 2021. I made a plan to physically write out the kanji, their meaning and reading then could test myself. I also click on the kanji charts and scroll down so I can only see the character and attempt to regurgitate the meaning and reading. It is amazing how effective the small bit of extra study is. If I struggle with either the meaning or the reading I click on the character and re-read and re-familiarise myself with the mnemonics. I have increased accuracy to virtually 100% and thus am flying through level 5.
I strongly recommend this approach, it’s 5 minutes more work for maximum advantage.
Cheers,
Deibido

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