Hey, I’ve heard that you should make a schedule to make your studies more efficient but I don’t understand how to and how it works. I’d like if someone could explain it to me
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Here’s one way to do it: Level 4 advice - #39 by sclu1034.
Since the SRS timings on WK are fixed, you have to schedule things in a different way than other learning.
The two big things in WK you can manage are
-How many lessons (and therefore) reviews you do a day
-When you do your reviews and lessons
It’s very tempting to do all lessons as soon as they arrive but this leads to massive blocks of reviews appearing at one time. This often leads to burnout though, so you want to control the number of lessons you do.
One common method is to keep your ‘apprentice’ items at a fixed number (50 to 100 is common), the higher the number the more reviews you have to do. If after a review session, that number goes below your target, you do lessons to get the apprentice number back up to your target. As you progress through WK, you’ll find a number that works for you.
Another is sticking to a number of lessons per day. I personally do 10 lessons per day, every day regardless of my apprentice numbers. This has the benefit of having a constant progression through the content but at the cost of an inconsistent review number per day (but it’s never more than I can manage).
As for when you do your reviews. As soon as they’re available is technically the best method but impractical for most people. Many people will do 2 or 3 sessions per day (so first thing, at lunch, before bed etc) which while not the most optimum, you can still get pretty much full speed if you wanted, so it’s not slowing you down.
Lessons are a bit more nuanced. Common wisdom is that the first 2 reviews of a new item are the most crucial for committing them to memory. These come at 4 hours after lesson, then 8 hours after the first review. With this in mind, people will tend to pick a certain time to do their lesson to hit these timings as close as possible.
Simplest is do lessons (and reviews) when you wake up (8am), reviews at lunch (1pm, 5 hours later) then reviews before bed (9pm, 8 hours) later. This gets those first three critical reviews in pretty much exactly as they come available.
Similarly, you could do lessons at around 5pm which then means first reviews at 9pm, and then you can get the third review stage in at 6-7am the next morning and not miss the timings.
Obviously, these timings should be adjusted around your sleep patterns and schedules, but the idea is there.
The important thing is to find something that suits you, you need to stay motivated, not get burned out but be making constant progress or you’ll end up quitting.
There’s plenty of other ways of planning your WK, but these are common, tried-and-tested methods that get used all the time by people on here.
My schedule on a weekday, for example:
7am - 10 lessons and reviews until I need to start work. Don’t fret about getting ALL reviews finished
10am - break time, finish off all reviews to get queue to 0
1230pm - lunch, do all reviews to 0. this hits the 4 hour timing on the lessons from the morning
5pm - get home from work, get review queue down to 0
5-9pm - sometimes clear my hourly review queue if I’m not busy doing anything
9pm - hit the 8 hour timing from lunch, get reviews down to 0, go to bed
I do around 150 reviews per day I believe which is a perfect work load for me. (I could and have done more but this routine is just easy to follow and doesn’t overwhelm me)
Weekends are a bit more free-flow, but you’ll find what works for you in time.
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I just do one general review session at the beginning of the day, 15 lessons after. Then do whatever reviews I can before 4pm (1 or more session). I tried to make sure everything is done by 4 though. So if I do one session, it’s at 4pm.
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This reminds me of an Yiddish proverb: “A man makes a plan and God laughs.” With SRS there is no point in studying the Kanji besides the lessons, we just do the reviews until it get stuck in you heart. Also, soon you will be swamped with reviews (300+ per day by level 40) if you do all your lessons. My “study plan” was to do reviews whenever I had some free time (during lunch break , while on the bus, before going to bed, between meetings, etc…)
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Check out the second post in this thread : My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK 📖 )
It helped me to understand how WK works when I first started.
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