my two points of free time are the mornings and evenings so that is when I have been doing my reviews but does that actually slow down your progress? Or does it matter since you getting them all done that day in either case?
Yeah, it’ll slow you down a little, but not catastrophically so. However, I will say it will end up in you having large piles of reviews happening all at once, and whilst at level 4 it’s very manageable, it might end up getting a bit much when you have a lot more to do. If I have a large pile, by the end of it I’m getting a lot more wrong than I would have done if the pile was smaller, because it can be tiring to plough through a lot all at once.
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So far for me it can get really tiring like the person above mentioned because I get a big pile. I try to do it at least 3 times a day. Morning, lunch, before bed.
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It might slow you down a little since you won’t have as many chances to review the words that you get wrong. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Learning Japanese is a long-term commitment anyway. The best speed for you is the one that you can stick with.
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The review intervals are pretty much optimal for 2 times a day with a 3rd time of the day only for new items. For example
7AM - Lessons and reviews
11AM - 1st review of new items
7PM - Reviews
Or
7AM - reviews
3PM - Lessons
7AM - Reviews
The first one is pretty much how I’ve done it and I averaged 8 day level ups. If you aren’t able to squeeze in that midday review or lessons then you may take longer depending on your accuracy. The review interval for first review is 4 hours so waiting too much longer that that might make it a lot harder for you to remember them.
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Yep, this is the best method to save your sanity, and what @jprspereira outlines in their guide, My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK 📖 ) - #2 by jprspereira.
The times I do my reviews and lessons are 6am reviews (latest I’ll do them is 8am), 6pm lessons (10-20 a day), 10pm review those lessons, sleep haha.
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Some people review once a day, some twice, and others do a few reviews at a time all day. The only way it would slow you down is if you have aspirations of speed leveling to 60. Which there are plenty of threads about to read about how monstrous a task this is and how to go about it most efficiently.
Otherwise, you would only add about 8-12 hours per level to your speed, and that isn’t much to worry about. You’re far more likely to intentionally slow yourself down due to massive overload of lessons and reviews.
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Twice a day isn’t bad. Because I’m rushing to get to Level 60 before Military Conscription, whenever I have done new Kanji or Radical lessons, I have no choice but to do lessons once and reviews twice that day, as Apprentice I → Apprentice 2 is about 4 hours while Apprentice 2 → Apprentice 3 is 8 hours.
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Agreed. It won’t necessarily slow you down (doing the reviews twice/day vs 3-4-5 times/day), but what will slow you down if you only do it twice/day is you’ll have so many reviews that you’ll start making a lot of mistakes. Making a mistake on an apprentice item may only knock it down a level or two, but making mistakes on master or enlightened can set you back quite a bit. Smaller stacks mean less to remember, which can mean more correct answers that will help get items closer to burn with less work. Also, less mistakes means the reviews go faster, so if you’re worried about time, it may actually make more sense to do them more often. Quicker reviews, more right answers, less time overall. Try to keep your reviews to around 50-60 if possible. You can also get the Tsurukame app so you can do reviews whenever you have a few minutes spare time.
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where it might slow you down is by not having that initial review 4 hours after the lessons. that first review is supposed to be soon after the lesson to reinforce what you learned. that could lead to making more errors, which significantly increases the time it takes to advance items to guru.
besides that, it’s probably sane to limit how often you do reviews, so that WK doesn’t take over your whole day.
much bigger influences on your speed are how many lessons you do per day, and getting too many incorrect answers when advancing your apprentice 4 radicals and kanji to guru.
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If you do your lessons 4 hours before your first review session and do the next review session roughly 8 hours after the first one, then it’s not going to slow you down.
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I suggest at least 3 times / day.
You should definitely use app on smartphone I think (so you can just do review anytime you are able to)
I was having full time job and my timetable was (in brackets are optional):
- early review in the morning (some more for lunch)
- in the afternoon after work (when you are commuting)
- in the evening (even late evening). I made sure that I solved all the review apprearing in this final session (ofc there will be another reviews for the next couple of hours but just made sure to do all reviews in the final review session of the day)
so base on your schedule maybe you should really find a way to do the afternoon review.
else you will be a bit slow down but you are still progressing (assuming that you do all your reviews for the day and regularly taking small chunks of lessons)
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To give you an actual idea on how much it slows you down, I’ve done consistently 2x a day since I started WaniKani. With perfect/near perfect accuracy you lose about 2 days per level, however, every time you miss a few apprentice 1 items you lose ~9 more hours than you would if you did more than 2 reviews a day. Once you get up into higher apprentice levels and above you don’t lose hardly any time over what you’d get studying more than 2 times per day.
This means if you’re interested in speed, you should consider going to 3 times a day whenever you complete lessons. And if you’re interested in speed you should be completing all your kanji and radical lessons as soon as they’re available.
All that being said, speed isn’t everything, and it’s usually best not to go too fast to avoid burnout.
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2-3 times a day is about right, but my goal is not trying to get pass the level as soon as possible. Learning Kanji is not like playing video game. There is no rush to get to level 60.
I usually only reviewed once a day, and often skipped days
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I think the only slowdown will be due to not reviewing recently learned kanji at the four and eight hour points. This’ll add a day or so to each level.
To avoid this you could make sure to do an extra review four hours after doing a kanji lesson, and otherwise do only twice a day. (This is pretty much what I did)
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Maximum leveling speed roughly goes down from 7 days to 8 days per level. Unless you are striving for maximum speed, it’s not going to matter much.
I also review twice a day. You will find that your apprentice 1 interval, which is meant to be 4 hours, will now be 12 hours (if you lesson during those same two review moments), which can hurt your accuracy for that interval - I actually do a manual review of my lessons about an hour after taking them to prevent this, but other than that…
if twice a day suits your schedule, then go for it. Maintaining a steady rhythm is more important than the actual speed with which you go through it.
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Is it OKAY? Yes. Anything you need to do to keep your sanity. And as long as you keep moving forward, you are learning.
The point of WaniKani is to learn, not win a race.
Will it slow you down? Yes because some of the SRS intervals are 4 hours after you first learn something, so if you learn it at 8 AM, at noon you would have it ready for review. So you lengthen the time between SRS stages this way. Does it hurt anything? No.
I will agree with the others who are saying you will end up with large blocks of reviews. Not so bad where you are today but when you start getting those big blocks mixing in with your Burns, you may end up screaming if you aren’t prepared for it. If these are the times you have available though, and you can work through a block of 100-200 reviews in each block, go for it.
Whatever keeps you moving forward!
I do twice a day and I’ve managed to get to level 31 in about six months. Like others have said I do add in a third review on days when I learn new material to help speed things along. Aside from that third review every three days there’s not much you can do to really speed it up, it’s going to take you a week minimum to guru a level no matter what you do.
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Some items are more important than others. Your current level kanji and radicals will set you back if you don’t do them right away. What I did to reduce my time on level (without constantly reviewing all day) was, I use the Tsurukame app on my phone (iOS only, I think Flaming Durtles is for Android) and have it reorder to review current level items first. Those, make sure to do right when they pop up, and since it’s only a few items it doesn’t take too long. Tsurukame also tells you when the next current level kanji or radical (level-up review) is going to pop up.
Vocab and previous level items you can pretty much do whenever you want (it’ll still do you good to them the same day though, so the reviews don’t pile up too much).