How to pace new review items

WaniKani
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Hi all! I’ve been using WaniKani since the end of August. I’m at level 10. It’s generally going great, although I’m not sure if the introduction pace of new items is ideal, and therefore, whether this can be modified.

For example, I would not have any new items for days in a row. And then, when I jump to a new level, I’d have 120 new items at the same time. This seems illogical and irrational to me? Wouldn’t it be better to spread these out over more days? Or am I doing something wrong?

Also, whenever I unlock a new level, I first have to dig through 50+ vocabulary of the old level, which seem to be suddenly unlocked…

Thanks in advance for your help!

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Unlocking a surplus of vocabulary lessons all at once is the result of doing too many kanji lessons all at once. They all reach guru at the same time, and consequently unlock their vocabulary. Ideally you would do 1-5 kanji lessons a day, and fill the remaining lessons with vocab.

It’s not officially released yet, but with Wanikani’s new lesson picker, you can choose which lessons to do. I use it to select two kanji and eight vocab, so I do ten lessons a day and always have lessons available.

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*hotdogsuplex just beat me to it :sweat_smile:

Hi Julien!

You can use custom scripts to reorder the lessons, but Wanikani have recently soft-launched a lesson picker which I’ve found to be super useful so far. I’m using it to do 5-10 new vocab lessons using kanji I already know and 2 new kanji lessons a day, which is helping the kanji to stick a lot better than having them all come at once.

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It seems we pretty much posted at the same time lol :laughing:

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Haha yes, and also identical advice! :handshake:

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Hi, I have the same challenge as you do, but I think it is linked at the pace that I go through.

There will be a jump in lessons when reaching a new level, but the old vocab is added on because all my second wave of kanjis essentially go to guuru at the same time.

I am currently sticking to a 7-8 days per level schedule (quite close to your pace I think) but at some point I will slow down to even out the lessons more and also to keep the reviews from increasing too much when burn items come in.

If you use an App you can also tailor what lessons you go through first (old vs new ones) and currently I prioritize radicals and kanjis, and then only process old vocab (before the second wave of kanjis). Again, that’s the result of trying to keep high pace for now.

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This explains how to space your lessons in a way that won’t backfire later

And this is the ultimate guide

I really recommend reading it so you’ll understand how to optimize your schedule so you won’t burnout.

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you’re not forced to do items just because they’re in your lessons pile. Do as many as you want to, then stop, and you’ll end up with lessons throughout the level. :slight_smile:

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If you do about 20 vocab a day, you will mostly get a steady flow with your reviews when your leveling speed is 7-8 days.

  • day 1 of new lesson → all radicals + 20 vocab + 5 new level kanji
  • each day 5-6 new kanji and 20 vocab until your radicals get to guru and the rest of the kanji unlock
  • once the kanji unlock, do all of the remaining ones and keep the 20 vocab per day

Works for me, but I don’t spend too much time with vocab so I don’t know if that is too much if you actually learn all the items. :slight_smile:

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My plan was always keeping the apprentice number below 100, if below then I do 5 new lessons.

Otherwise I spend days without doing any new lesson, so I dont overwhelm myself. Doing this just hit lvl 60 in 2 years and 10 months. Good pace IMO.

Usually I have 160 reviews per day.

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Thank you all for the incredibly fast and helpful advice! Now I can sleep peacefully again. I will stick to the 5 kanji / 20 vocab a day pace.

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There are already great answers here but I thought I’d throw in my own process for the sake of presenting something a little different. I will say though an advantage of what the others have posted is being able to use only vanilla WaniKani features to achieve what you want, whereas I have to rely on Reorder Omega to reorder my lessons and use a batch size higher than 10.

Every level up I write out something like the following to myself, as my plan for that level:

11, 12, 11 for kanji this level (22)
3rad + 12voc, 4rad + 12voc of 80 prev lvl voc → 56voc remaining (18, 19, 19) | also including 1 new prev lvl kanji added from content additions
27 current lvl voc (13, 14)

Doing my lesson batches like this gets me a similar result of max 20 lessons in a day and never going above 100 apprentice items at once. My current pace is a level up every 12 to 16 days (very often exactly 14) depending on how many vocabulary items were unlocked.

When a new level unlocks, I do a mixture of the new radicals and previous level vocab (and for this level I had to throw in one kanji that was added via content additions). When I’m done with that, I move on to pure previous level vocabulary, trying to divide it up into nice batch sizes to do per day. This time there wasn’t a lot of vocab, so I only got 3 batches. Most of the time it’s 4 and sometimes it’ll even be 5 batches. Then when I finish those I do the vocab that was unlocked but at the current level (because they will all be based on previous level kanji, so to me they get in the way of me learning the current level kanji; thus I do them beforehand). Once all vocab is done, I do the kanji, now in 3 batches whereas before custom batch sizing was added to Reorder Omega I had to do them in batches of 4.

Very different to what others were posting! In particular, interleaving kanji and vocab does not work for me because all the vocab will be based on previous level kanji; but I seem to be in the minority when it comes to people that prefer to do all a level’s kanji together (not in one go to be clear).

Glad you were able to come to a decision on a process that will hopefully work well for you! Good luck and good learning!

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Did they say what day the lesson picker will be out? What does the lesson pick do exactly? It doesn’t mess with the SRS does it?

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Not sure when it’s officially launched.
I can’t see how it would mess with the SRS, as the only difference is rather than me doing my lessons in the order Wanikani has decided, I can pick which vocab/kanji to I want to study first.

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It’s still being developed. They will make an announcement post about it when it is more ready to be released so keep an eye out for that. It’s not possible to mess with the SRS, especially not with a tool developed by WaniKani themselves. It just lets you pick what lessons to do instead of having to do them in the order given by WaniKani.

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I don’t really have any general advices for how to pace your lessons and reviews, but here’s how I do mine (or at least plan to do after I get into the rythm)

I decided to build myself a schedule that is as efficient as possible. I wake up at 6:00 A.M. every day and go to bed at around 10:00 P.M., this means I can do my first reviews at around 7:00 A.M. (I don’t wake up and instantly go to my laptop) and my last ones at 10:00 P.M.

Based on this, this is how I plan to proceed:
If I unlock a new level, I will try to do the Radical lessons instantly in the time span of 6:00 to 7:00 P.M., so that I can do my first reviews at 10:00 P.M., and after 7:00 P.M. and in the time until I bring the Radicals to Guru, I will also do the Vocabulary and Kanji lessons that I already unlocked to make sure I only get the Radicals at 10:00 P.M. (I don’t do all Vocabs and Kanijs at once, though, only like 20 to 30, maybe 40 if I’m bored, at once), and since I only review the radicals there, this should be possible in quite a short time. The next reviews of these radicals would be at 6 A.M. then, so I do them at 7:00 A.M., then the next review is next day at 7:00 A.M. and then two days later, again at 7:00 A.M., I can bring them up to Guru.

Then, when I unlock the Kanjis, I instantly do the rest of them in the time span of 7:00 A.M. to 8:00 A.M., so the first review will be at 11:00 A.M, the next one at 7:00 P.M., then the next one at 6:00 P.M. the next day and then the final review two days later at 6:00 P.M, completing the cycle and setting up the same procedure for the next level.

As I said, I do the Vocabulary lessons somewhere in between these stuffs, but always make sure that I do them while I am still at the same level at which I got them.

That is what I plan to do, but it might change over time.

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Based on some of the posts I’ve seen (:clap: thank you), I came up with this to help me figure things out. Around midnight it gets a bit out of whack. I am by no means a spreadsheet expert. ᕠ( ᐛ )ᕤ

waniSRS
WaniSRS2

edit: on 5/11/24 it is at the enlightened level and once you do the review, it will be burned. In a perfect world where you are able to do your reviews on time.