So this has been a recurring problem for me for quite a few months now, but basically most of my reviews come very late. Here’s a picture of what tomorrow is going to look for me (Picture taken after doing the majority of my reviews for today)
As you can see, all those reviews come in the early AMs of the next day. I deal with that everyday and it’s tiring. I don’t go to sleep until ~6:20 AM because I have a prayer to do at ~5:45 AM, if I wasn’t doing WaniKani, I’d normally sleep at like 2:00 AM or something and just wake up to pray and go back to sleep. But well, since my reviews come at this time, and I want to go full speed, I just opted to not sleep during that time.
Honestly though, I’m fed up with it and I do want to sleep, might not be good for my weight too, because I get a bit hungry after a while and feel the urge to snack.
In any case, once I hit 60, I’ll be fixing my sleep schedule anyway, just wanted to know if I could do something with my lessons in the meantime to do it a bit early. (I don’t want to go any slower though)
Many use a strict schedule for reviewing, that will give you reviews at specific times of the day. Maybe try it yourself?
In any case, for planning it, try to consider the SRS-timings:
and reading this helpful post:
It really contains all you need to know about how to manipulate and control the reviewing process.
Personally, i did like you, reviewed at various points in the day. Though never during the night. There is simply no need to do any reviews when you can sleep. Don’t do WK slavishly like that. Just do reviews that have accumulated when you wake up!
But, for others, it’s better to make reviewing dedicated time-slots that can work within their study/work/life-schedule overall. That’s for you do decide.
Edit: for example my schedule looks like this now, since I never ever do reviews before I wake up, and now I also don’t do them after a certain time of day, when I just wanna relax and watch anime etc.
Basically, the Apprentice levels have hours between the SRS-stages. But later on we’re talking weeks, months and so, which means the reviews come back the same hour, just a week later for example. If you simply stop doing any reviews in the middle of the night, there will be no reviews in the middle of the night.
Basically, I only do it in the morning and maybe at lunch. Or I’ve accumulated reviews to do, which can be done whenever.
I agree with the above. You need to work with the SRS system timings so it matches to your life schedule.
I would do new lessons twice a day: first thing in the morning, and again about five hours before I planned to go to bed. Your first review will be four hours after the lesson, and the next one will be eight hours after that. So basically I ended up getting my biggest chunk of reviews either first thing in the morning, or last thing in the evening. And that worked for me.
As a short-term solution to your problem of reviews popping up in the middle of the night, you could put yourself on vacation mode for less than 24 hours and that should shift your review anniversaries to a different time of day.
Have to agree with the person above me. Whenever the amount of reviews gets overwhelming, I stop learning new lessons and just focus on taking care of the reviews. There’s no need to complete all of them in one sitting either, just do as much as you’re comfortable with, save the rest for later.
I agree with the others. Stop doing the new lessons and just do reviews only. When doing reviews time yourself with the SRS system. So that way when you do end up starting new reviews again it will be timed so it’s not coming in at 1am. When I learn something new I do it in the morning as I know it will could up in 4 hours and then in 8 hours, but it’s while I’m awake not asleep so it’s not piling up as I sleep.
Also you don’t have to do all your reviews at once and same with new lessons. I never do all the new lessons at once and do them in smaller chucks so I never get crazy high review numbers either.
I’m definitely aware of the SRS stages, I wouldn’t have been able to go at my speed without knowing them, but the problem doesn’t seem to be my new lessons, it’s almost always old stuff that come during that time.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree completely, I always recommend new users to not do what I’m doing, I don’t enjoy doing 300 a day, but I set my goal to complete by the end of year so I can kind of wean off WaniKani and move to more reading. I don’t have the energy to do much else if I am still doing WaniKani, but I love how it gave me structure and made me believe Japanese isn’t out of reach for me.
Honestly didn’t think of that lol. I have a hard time doing my reviews during the day for some reason, like if I were to put 200 of them during the day, I’m not sure I’d be able to do it all. I’m just not focused I guess, meanwhile at night, I have to finish them before my prayers so I guess it’s just me being a procrastinator?
I used to do that for like the first half of WaniKani but I’d let myself get comfortable and it’d be hard to get in a good habit again. I don’t particularly enjoy my number of reviews a day, but if I have to do it to keep my pace, that’s OK, I just want to have them spread out a bit more.
Though, it seems I just have to change the time I do those reviews, so thank you for all the answers everyone, I’ll be experimenting with that, will try not to let all them come in during the day though because of my lack of focus during that time.
If you’re up for prayer at 5:45 AM, I suggest doing radical and kanji lessons around 6PM. They’ll come up for App I review at 10 PM and App II review at 6AM - so you can do those right after your morning prayer. And you’ll have no reviews that affect your levelling speed between 10:30 PM and 5:45 AM.
Note that to get ‘rid’ of the 2 AM reviews, you need to stop doing them at 2 AM. Anything beyond Guru won’t affect your levelling speed anyway, and all those reviews are on timers that are a whole multiple of a day (minus 1 hour), so if you do them at 2 AM, they’ll keep coming back around that time.
… just saw your reply - if the 2 AM reviews are mostly older stuff, it won’t affect your levelling to put them off until morning.
I only go into lessons if my Apprentice items are below 100. If I am learning new kanji, vocab, or radicals then I limit myself to 10 lessons a day. This system has helped keep my review count very manageable. I used to blast through lessons as fast as possible and would wake up to 200-300 reviews every morning. With my aforementioned system in place, the most I’ll wake up to is 100-120.
Ok this seems the fastest method to burn out quickly - you need to change this. I do exactly 7 days and 0 hours per level. I do my first reviews at 9am and my last ones at 12am. During the day I don’t have reviews every hour but around 8 times per day.
It takes a bit of calculating to find out when to do reviews, when those reviews come back again and then it takes a while for the algorithm to adapt because you now already have reviews all over the place.
There is a script which shows you how many vocab you have within the apprentice level ( which has 4 stages itself) which helps me a lot in finding out when to do my lessons and reviews.
I always do my reviews as early as possible, around 9 or 10am. Those come back in 4 hours, then in 8 hours so I will get the second batch of reviews for those vocab around 9 or 10pm.
That is a bit of the disadvantage of srs - it takes a bit of time to fully understand the system so you can manipulate it to fit into your schedule while going at max speed.
Losing sleep because of kw is really a bad idea and not necessary at all. Best of luck!
Oh yeah I’ve definitely been burnt out for a while. I did sleep a bit earlier last night though, leaving reviews left undone to try out the advice I got. I’ll be making some small steps to remedy this
