Hi all,
I’m a bit new to the Wanikani scene, and I really love it. So far this is hands down my preferred method for learning kanji. But holy shit, how do you stop the reviews from accumulating so much? I use this thing every single day, but like, sometimes life happens you know? If i miss a day or most of a day Ill have a huge pile of things to be reviewed next morning, then I’ll struggle to clear that out all at once if I can manage, get busy with other stuff and skip a couple of wanikani alerts, and BAM, by late evening I have again a massive pile of things to review. And since I rushed the process in the previews go, I wouldn’t have had learned things properly, so It would be even harder to complete, and it becomes this cyclical thing.
In short, PAIN brothers and sisters, pain.
Isn’t there a way to stop this thing from accumulating lessons and reviews automatically over and over? Like “Hey, he has not yet reviewed this 30 items, I better no drop this other 30 on top of the pile just yet.” Haha something like that… no?
I’m so busy getting ready for my flight to Japan, I gave up on Wanikani for today haha, which makes me scared to find out how many lessons and reviews I will need to do when I get back into it in a few days.
Some days I log in to see 300 reviews. This is just how the system works. 30 reviews should honestly take you maybe 5-8 minutes at the very most. If it’s more than that, you haven’t learned/remembered the item. I give myself about 10 seconds per item, then I fail it. If you don’t do something like this, you’ll never survive when you start to pile on more reviews in later levels.
Do the reviews in batches of 15. Take a little break and repeat until you complete it all. You can’t stop the reviews from piling up unless you just stop doing new lessons.
I’d say just keep at them whenever you have the time. If you know ahead of time that you aren’t going to be able to do them for a few days, make sure you activate vacation mode. I recently just recovered from something like a 500+ review buildup and powered throw them about 100 at a time. As long as you’re consistently doing your reviews throughout the day, or even just hammering them all out at the end of the day, you should be okay. Sometimes you just get large batches though, and some days you may have to dedicate an hour or more of your time to get your reviews down to zero. Just the way it is, I suppose.
Well, you’ve got two main options:
1. Reduce your number of imminent reviews by holding off on doing new lessons. Your existing items will still come round for review, but as you promote them to longer intervals (and eventually burn them), your review workload will taper off.
2. Use Vacation Mode. It’s near the bottom of the Settings page, but you might need to be subscribed to use it. What it does is freeze your reviews completely - nothing will be added to your review pile until you turn it off. But nor can you do reviews while it’s on, I think. It’s really meant for when you’re not going to be able to use WK at all. I’m sure it used to be a week before you could activate it again, but the page says “one day,” so you might be able to make frequent use of it if you really want to.
If you were already subscribed, I’d say definitely hit Vacation Mode until you get back from your trip. But since you’re still in the free levels and would probably have to subscribe just to do it, for time you’re not even going to be here to use the system, I recommend that you just leave it and deal with the review pile when you get back. You only have two level’s worth of items unlocked, which really isn’t very many in the scheme of things. Sure, they’ll mostly all be piled up when you get back, but you can absolutely chip away at them and get them under control quickly if you just buckle down and do it.
As for when you’re back, and subscribed (should you choose to), I wouldn’t use Vacation Mode unless you’re actually going to be away for at least a few days. By just holding off on doing lessons, you can reduce your imminent workload to as manageable an amount as you need to. As long as you’re doing something each day - so you don’t get into the habit of putting it off.
MajesticPanda said... Some days I log in to see 300 reviews. This is just how the system works. 30 reviews should honestly take you maybe 5-8 minutes at the very most. If it's more than that, you haven't learned/remembered the item. I give myself about 10 seconds per item, then I fail it. If you don't do something like this, you'll never survive when you start to pile on more reviews in later levels.Holy crap. I freak out if I even have 100 reviews. Do you do them every day?
jtoronto said...I do my reviews every day, usually twice or even three times if I can manage it otherwise every day would be up to 300 reviews at once too. I think at some point the number ceases to freak you out as much and WK just becomes part of your life.MajesticPanda said... Some days I log in to see 300 reviews. This is just how the system works. 30 reviews should honestly take you maybe 5-8 minutes at the very most. If it's more than that, you haven't learned/remembered the item. I give myself about 10 seconds per item, then I fail it. If you don't do something like this, you'll never survive when you start to pile on more reviews in later levels.Holy crap. I freak out if I even have 100 reviews. Do you do them every day?
My suggestion is to use that nifty little function while doing your reviews that lets you choose when to end your reviews. I do this when life happens and I can’t clear my review total each day. So, instead of tackling the full 200, I’ll just chip away at in bits here and there. Much more manageable.
The other thing nobody has mentioned , is that if you don’t do the reviews as they become available (or as near to as possible), aren’t you sort of getting rid of the benefits of the SRS system?
This is my second time round (got to about lvl 17 before I had a baby and struggled for a while). I’ve made a conscious effort not to do more then 25 lessons a day, and spending a lot more time learning the lessons. Subsequently I’m pretty much acing all the reviews and find myself getting through them a lot quicker than I used to.
paperbagchild said...It's usually a case where I had to do something for a day or two and slacked. When that happens, I power through in one day on the next weekend and then I have a few hundred items that just moved to the same due date in the future. I stopped worrying and I make sure I do all my reviews most nights and it keeps the count low 90% of the time.jtoronto said...I do my reviews every day, usually twice or even three times if I can manage it otherwise every day would be up to 300 reviews at once too. I think at some point the number ceases to freak you out as much and WK just becomes part of your life.MajesticPanda said... Some days I log in to see 300 reviews. This is just how the system works. 30 reviews should honestly take you maybe 5-8 minutes at the very most. If it's more than that, you haven't learned/remembered the item. I give myself about 10 seconds per item, then I fail it. If you don't do something like this, you'll never survive when you start to pile on more reviews in later levels.Holy crap. I freak out if I even have 100 reviews. Do you do them every day?
Vacation mode can prevent them from piling up if you’re going to be gone for a while. But really the best way is simply to try to do them on time before they have a chance to pile up too much. If you want to reduce the overall review load you do so by reducing the speed at which you do lessons, but since you’re level 2 I don’t think you’ve really run into this territory yet, for you it seems like more an issue of just doing them on time. I’d try to set aside at least one or two times a day that you can do reviews.
Also you get faster with experience, you’ll see a hundred reviews later on and not even blink. It’s really better to try to practice moving as quickly as you can on reviews, I feel like you retain them better this way when you practice calling it up fast rather than sitting around for 10-20 seconds on each one asking yourself if you’re REALLY sure if that is the correct answer.
Just checked your profile and you only have 130 things unlocked, so there’s your upper limit on the number of reviews you’re going to have. Nothing to get bent out of shape over.
Levels 1 and 2 are accelerated levels btw, so things will slow down once you hit level 3, at least they did for me anyway. As others have noted, the best way to ensure you don’t get huge review dumps (usually followed by long periods of nothing to do) is to set a fixed about of lessons to do per day instead of doing them all as soon as they become available. This spreads out the review scheduling.
If I were you I would set aside a specific amount of time to dedicate to WaniKani, say like 20mins/day on lessons + 10mins/day on reviews, or less if you don’t have that much time. Lessons should take a lot longer than doing the reviews, you should be able to answer each review item in about 1-5 seconds on average. Occasionally you will have to think through a particular item for longer (10-20secs), which is fine too. For lessons you should try to focus on picturing the story using as many senses as possible (smell, taste, touch and sound, as well as sight), this will really help you be able to recall items in the first few initial reviews, after this you should stop needing to focus so much on the story and the meaning/reading will just pop into your head automatically without having to think too much about it.
As everyone said here…
But man, if you struggle already… I wish you the best of luck… Use the tips here to get a nice pattern 
You don’t.
You let it consume you until you don’t know what real life is like anymore.
Then when you become level 60, your apprentice slowly decreases until one day you wake up and you have no pending reviews.
It is at that moment you realize that there is more to life than your computer screen and you go outside, but are immediately sunburned because it has been so long since you’ve experienced the UV rays of sunlight.
mahum said... You don't.We're supposed to go outside when we reach Level 60?? Crud... I've been sitting here waiting for new levels!
You let it consume you until you don't know what real life is like anymore.
Then when you become level 60, your apprentice slowly decreases until one day you wake up and you have no pending reviews.
It is at that moment you realize that there is more to life than your computer screen and you go outside, but are immediately sunburned because it has been so long since you've experienced the UV rays of sunlight.
Well, at least I didn't get sunburned...
rfindley said...It's okay. I've heard that in 2016, the sun is overrated anyway.mahum said... You don't.We're supposed to go outside when we reach Level 60?? Crud... I've been sitting here waiting for new levels!
You let it consume you until you don't know what real life is like anymore.
Then when you become level 60, your apprentice slowly decreases until one day you wake up and you have no pending reviews.
It is at that moment you realize that there is more to life than your computer screen and you go outside, but are immediately sunburned because it has been so long since you've experienced the UV rays of sunlight.
Well, at least I didn't get sunburned...
It's neither hip nor trendy so I will have none of it!
Waiting for new levels seems to be the best option at this present time.
rfindley, setting new trends since forever.
Not having time isn’t an excuse, you can always make time. I work a different job now but I was level 5 and I was doing wanikani twice a day alongside a 15 hour a day job. But anyway, Just because the reviews become available doesn’t mean you have to do them ASAP.
Hey guys! Thanks for all the suggestions. I am not a subscriber yet, I plan to be, maybe in a couple weeks when things settle down after my move to Japan. I had no idea that vacation mode existed. That should do the trick!