The last time I tried tracking it, I did 116 reviews in 22 minutes (spread throughout the day), which comes out to 5.27 reviews a minute, or 316 reviews per hour. But I never have more than like 130 reviews a day (at least, on WK alone), and I think the most I’ve ever done in one sitting is 50, so I don’t know if I could actually keep up that rate for a block of over 300 reviews.
I have pretty good accuracy (my overall accuracy on wkstats is an average of 93%), and the majority of the meanings/readings come to me pretty quickly when I see the items. If I look at an item and realize immediately that I don’t know it, I’ll just fail the review and move on, but for most of the items that I struggle with, I do try take the time to try and remember them. I’ve heard that it helps your memory more if you struggle to retrieve your memory of something, but then manage to remember it (rather than just giving up and looking at the answer quickly). From my personal experience, this does seem to be true. If I manage to come up with the correct answer after thinking about it for a bit, the next review of that item is generally much easier for me.
I do use many of the mnemonics, though I also make up a lot of my own (if the kanji is in the name of a wrestler I’m familiar with, I just use the wrestler as my mnemonic, haha). Generally, they seem to work as intended for me, where I use them until I’ve internalized the meaning/reading of the item, and then stop relying on them.
When I make mistakes, I take a little bit of time during the review session to look at the correct answer, but don’t spend a lot of time going back over it unless I truly don’t remember the answer. I practice my leeches with the leech training script, so if I fail an item repeatedly, it will usually show up there . I’ve found that script to be more effective for practicing because it often pairs similar looking items together (which tends to cause most of my mistakes) and forces me to learn to recognize the difference between them.
This jibes with my experience as well. I usually know within the first few seconds if I “should” be able to recall the answer or if it’s something I’ve completely forgotten. With the former, it’s almost always worth the extra time to pull it forward in my memory. The next review for that item is usually much quicker.
Other times I think I know it, struggle, eventually recall the answer, type it in, and finally discover I’m completely wrong anyway. <laugh> I suspect everyone has to find their own happy medium for the slowest response time, and it depends on each individual item. Brain farts happen, but at least I know when it’s happening!
Personally, I’ve never bothered with targeted leech training. If I see a familiar item that I’m about to fail again, I’ll answer incorrectly and then take the time then and there to figure out why I keep missing it. This usually results in me typing in some notes for that item. I do this both for leeches that keep advancing then returning to earlier stages, as well as for “normal” items that just seem harder than most to advance.
How about this as an alternative approach? There’s a userscript that puts a time limit on how long you have to answer each review question. If you take too long it automatically marks it wrong.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t used it myself but this may be worth a test to see what effect it has.
On the plus-side you’ll have much faster review sessions - no agonising for minutes at a time trying to recall the answer. The downside is that you’ll likely have more wrong answers per session. But they’ll come up more frequently again if they fall down the SRS levels and hopefully get more reinforced in your mind.
Checked my heatmap, apparently if I really focus, I can do around 460 items in 1.5 hours, so give or take 300 items an hour. That’s 5 items a minute, probably on a computer.
If your accuracy falls that drastically, you risk becoming demotivated.
Accuracy is usually more a function of how many items you have in early Apprentice stages (how frequently you do lessons) rather than how quickly you answer during a review.
I’d say don’t worry about how long it takes you to answer each individual question. Rather, just try to balance your workload so you:
Maintain a comfortable number of items in early Apprentice stages
Are comfortably able to get your daily review queue down to zero every day
Can accomplish 2 in one or two sessions of however much time you have to devote each day.
Can answer correctly about 80% or more of the time during your sessions
My comfort zone is about 100 Apprentice items, around 150 reviews/day, 1 hour daily review sessions, and about 85% to 92% accuracy (as reported next to the thumbs-up icon on each individual review page).
I don’t know about kanji review but in average i can estimate around 200/250 review per hour and 95+% accurcary (level 13).
That is some of my stats if it can help you to compare with mine.
How much time do you spend on your lessons, and do you hit close to the 4 hour and 8 hour review intervals after doing your lessons? I’ve found that those first two review sessions are critical for my accuracy, as well as drilling new lesson items immediately after learning them with the self-study quiz script. It might be that you’re just not learning the information very well initially, which is causing you to struggle more with remembering it later.
So far the radicals only take me a second to answer. The kanji meanings are usually pretty fast and easy too, but I have to think a bit more to remember some of the readings. Even for the easy ones though I still take a few seconds to make sure I don’t accidentally get a kanji/vocab mixed up with another.
It mostly depends on whether the current set of kanji/vocab is easy for me or not. Sometimes my accuracy is almost 100% and other times it’s like 60% if I’m tired and am forgetting everything.
I can usually do about 250 reviews in 30-45 minutes. I think the key to WaniKani is to answer within 5 seconds. If you can’t do that, just type “idk” or something and read the mnemonic/reading again. The next time you do reviews, you should be able to get it right. There are some more abstract ones that take longer for me to get right. Another thing that might help is to open up the level page you are on and just quickly glance over the radicals, kanji, and their reading right before you do your reviews.
I use the mobile app, so typing is slower. According to the heatmap, an average of 5.5 reviews per minute, not sure why you need that as it doesn’t mean anything. The most important thing is accuracy. Take your time to answer. Some might need more time than others as the complexity are not the same.
Forcing to answer faster would drop accuracy, delaying your level up and even reinforce the wrong answer, resulting in more leeches.
. I’ve found that script to be more effective for practicing because it often pairs similar looking items together (which tends to cause most of my mistakes) and forces me to learn to recognize the difference between them.