How I'm easily doing 100+ reviews a day

Hey guys,
First time posting in the forum.
Im currently on level 22 in wani kani(just got here today)
I’ve been crushing reviews and lessons since november 2018 and i absolutely love the system. It definitely works, my only regret is that i didn’t start using it when i started learning japanese(2016).

Anyways i’m posting to share some advice/get some feedback.
Around level 15ish the reviews started to really pile on.(about 80-100ish a day)
There would be times were i’d be super motivated to study and i’d get a level or two done in about 2-4 weeks but then i’d get super discouraged with the crap ton of reviews and id sit on a level for two to three months!

Important thing is i never gave up, but just slowed to a crawls pace, just doing reviews whenever i could and stopped doing lessons. In trying to strike a balance between consistent progress and manageable reviews, ive set in place the followin system(sorry if it reads like im coding, i do alot of that too):

for EACH hour~hour and a half that i am awake AND there are reviews queued DO no more than 10 reviews.(you can sneak in a few more if you want to if they are easy :))

IF there are lessons queued AND i’ve learned less than 12 new items for the day do 4 lessons after the 10 reviews

set your phone timer for one hour

rince and repeat

I’ve noticed that this takes up about 2-7 minutes of each hour of my day depending on if im doing lessons or not and im clearing 100 - 150 reviews a day.

The alarm is a little annoying but i find that the time it takes me to scroll instagram or reddit
i’ve cleared 10 reviews and learned 4 new kanji.

Its been keepting me consistent.
i’ve only been doing it for about two weeks now but im not seeing those crazy 50 review spikes (yet?)

Has anyone tried anything similar? What was your experience? Please let me know!

14 Likes

Welcome!

Awesome that you found something that works for you and keeping you consistent!

I did want to point out that people circumstances are different and I would think a good number of people do not have the leisure to take out time every hour to do something (e.g. working a customer facing job). Also, there’s a concept called “context switching” where there’s a time cost associated with switching tasks (for example, the time it takes for you to pull out your phone, navigate to WaniKani, and click the review button); it feels very negligible, but do that 12-16 times a day over the span of a couple of years and it really adds up.

There’s some exercises I’ve been doing 3-4 times daily for years. The reason I started doing it this way in the first place was because I thought taking a few minutes here and there throughout the day would feel negligible while still reaping in the benefits, as opposed to taking half an hour to do it all at once. To this day, I still do them but sometimes I think “this is annoying” and just want to get it over with all at once and not worry about it the rest of the day.

That’s kind of what I do with WaniKani. As I get lessons and reviews, I do it all at once. I’d personally rather take a 2 hour chunk out of my day, make it my priority, to get it out of the way than to spend 10 minutes 12 times a day.

That said, I want to be clear that this is my own experience and approach and there are tradeoffs with both pacing yourself and batching everything. So while your method is different than mine, you’ve found what works for you and I encourage you to keep at it!

7 Likes

Oh yes i did forget to mention that it might not work for everyone. I work an IT job and yes it can get hectic sometimes but im lucky enough to be able to check my phone whenever i need to. With that being said if you find yourself scrolling through social media often then i think you have the ability to give this method a shot.

Only two weeks into doing it so we’ll see if it holds up.

1 Like

I might’ve tried doing reviews frequently throughout the day in the beginning of my WK journey. However I wouldn’t recommend this. It’s too distracting.

Besides, I now keep a consistent schedule with lessons between 8 and 9 am. Then 1st review session around 12-1pm and the 2nd session around 9pm.

That’s it, only two reviews sessions. The fisrt one has around 50 reciews on average. The second is around 100. I need ~20 minutes for 100 reviews. So, it’s not difficult to knock it out in one sitting.

Although on some days I really hate doing reviews. If that’s the case I get a stopwatch and try to go as fast as can whith decent accuracy.

And even if I do hate reviews and even sometimes plan to skip a reciew session I end up giving in to the habit and doing them anyway.

1 Like

I’ve started eagerly putting effort into studying just over two months ago and my average daily review count sits at 161, with around 400-450 reviews each Thursday. Last week it was 461, but the second half of level 14 and the first half of level 15 was way easier this time around and I’ll only hit 359 today.

Aside from Thursdays and Sundays I tend to study in two blocks, while eating breakfast and just before going to bed. I find it to be the most efficient because I believe the thing @MeowMashiro mention about the downtime adding up to be true. Due to me sticking to a schedule, my review pile has adjusted accordingly and often even if I wanted to do the reviews around dinnertime there’s like, 15 words at most, and only around late hours it instantly jumps to a 100.

I try to prowl through the review queue even if I feel down because of the “no more zero days” rule that’s the 根元 of my studying process, but it gets pretty frustrating when your accuracy on words you should have known and you would have known otherwise drops to, like, 90% because you woke up on the wrong side of the bed. At least it’s easy to correct it later on, but it feels like it hinders the progress nonetheless.

Overall I’d say that deciding to invest in WaniKani has been one of my life-altering decisions and even though it’s sad to see the money leave my bank account every month, I consider it to be a good decision nonetheless!

1 Like

Somewhat related to the discussion I suppose. I historically have struggled with doing the lessons in a timely manner. Recently, I was thinking that I would very much like to stay in japan for longer than a typical vacation, but don’t have any real plans on how to do so. I thought maybe I’d try the whole going to language school over there for a year, and in researching that a bit I heard that they have four hours of classes and two hours of homework a day. That really put into perspective how little time I had actually been spending on studying Japanese. I decided why not try putting in that effort now (work hours permitting) and see if I could even hope to survive in a language school. As a result I’ve breezed through my lessons and reviews and find myself waiting on stuff to show up and not dreading getting to my queue. Funny how actually sitting down for a block of time makes you get things done. Not really a tips and trick sort of post, since most people can’t just say “spend 4 hours on Japanese a day”, but just wanted to share how a change in perspective has made my WaniKani habits change.

4 Likes

I went to language school for about a month before I found a job in Japan. At that school it was 3 hours a day(half that time was learning and half was practice), 5 times a week. Homework and studying was about 2-3 hours a day. We basically went through a chapter of Genki a week. We learned about 4 kanji a day for 4 days the the 5th day was a test. It was a reasonable pace for someone not working, a little challenging for someone working part time and would be nearly impossible for someone with a full time job(something would have to give). There are even more intensive schools out there, but hopefully this helps you with your studying plan. I will say that you don’t need to study in Japan to learn Japanese. You go to Japan for language school for the experience.

Also I studied at a school in the US. If you aren’t able to go to school in Japan there are schools and online tutors that can help you if you need more than self studying. They can also help with conversation practice.

1 Like

Good to hear of your experiences with the language school thing. And yeah, the idea definitely came around more as “I want to stay in Japan for longer than 3 months, so an option to do so is language school” rather than “I want to go to language school” :slight_smile: Honestly since I like my job, unless I could transfer to their Japan branch it’d be a hard sell for me anyway. I’ve just always felt so rushed when going over there, even when I went for two weeks with friends it was hard to just go out and explore when you’re running around everywhere. Maybe I’ll try out Sakura house or similar service for a month if I can swing that much time off of work, when the whole Corona thing dies down. Until then I really gotta ramp up my studies, I’ve been all but useless the past couple times :sweat_smile:

2 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.