How many reviews is too many? Apprentice/guru count and review accuracy

WaniKani
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I could definitely use some help/encouragement. I’m a pre-med student, and I’m concerned about burnout as well as going too slow.

My question is: What is my best strategy, going forward, to ensure that (1) my reviews aren’t overwhelmingly large and (2) I complete WaniKani in a timeframe of 2-3 years?

Any advice would definitely be appreciated. Thanks, everyone!

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(1) You should define what is overwhelming. It means different things for different people.
(2) The most important part is to be consistent. Do your reviews every day without skipping one day. If you must stop doing review set vacation mode. Failure to set vacation mode will result in a big pile of reviews when you come back.

Good rules of thumbs are:

A- Spread your lessons uniformly over the days. Something in the range of 15 to 25 lessons a day is reasonable with 20 being the most typical number. You will have to find out which rate suits you. In doubt try 20 lessons a day as a starting point. If you don’t spread lessons now you will experience big overwhelming spikes in your daily lesson workload when you reach the level where items start being burned.

B- Watch your Apprentice and Guru counts. The daily workload rises significantly when the values are over 100 for Apprentice and 500 for Guru. When that happens stop doing lessons until the numbers are back under these targets. But perhaps you can take higher workloads. In that case increase your Apprentice and Guru limits until you reach a comfortable workload.

2 Likes
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Thank you, Prouleau. I’ll follow that method and try not to slip lower than 15 lessons a day. The Apprentice/Guru information is great too. I plan on telling myself, “it’s only a few years. I just have to keep going.”

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You’ve received plenty of feedback by now and you’ll just have to find something that works for yourself. For the record, here is what I am doing and what seems to work quite well for me. I’m certain that I’ll be 60 (or close to it) by the end of this year, so after roughly 18 months of Wanikani.

  • Always do reviews everyday. Even if it’s the most busy day of your life, there is no excuse to not at least do 25 reviews when you’re in the bathroom or something.
  • Try to get your reviews down to zero every day.
  • No lessons when there are reviews available.
  • No lesson reordering. Vocab cards reinforce the readings you learned and it’s important to get started on them soon after you have Guru’d the corresponding kanji cards. Yes, sometimes that pushes my potential level up back a day or two until I can whittle down the lessons to reach the next radical cards.

If I’m very busy, I generally hold off on lessons, even if I manage to get my reviews down to zero. In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter if it takes a few months more or less. It’s much more important to keep yourself from burning out, the faster you go, the higher the risk.

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