I live in Japan but I work on a Pacific Time zone schedule (e.g. Los Angeles time).
I generally go to bed around 6pm local time, waking up around 3am for work.
Wanikani doesn’t seem to allow the user to set their timezone, because I have reviews stacked up after my bedtime and then not starting up again until I’ve been awake for 4-5 hours. Am I missing something or am I just stuck with a schedule that doesn’t match my availabilty?
Review times don’t depend on your timezone. After the first two levels, the first review cycle will come aorund 4 hours after your lessons, then the next 8 hours after that, then 23 hours later and then 47 hours later.
The full behaviour can be read here: WaniKani’s SRS Stages | WaniKani Knowledge
The ultimate guide has some pointers on how to organize your day to get the most out of reviews.
I see…I think. Thanks. So it’s normal for many of the reviews to be scheduled at a time when the user is asleep?
Maybe I’m not getting it.
It all depends on the time you do your lessons (and then the subsequent reviews). Say you do your lessons at 10am. The first review will be at 14.00, then, assuming you answer correctly, at 22:00, then the next day at 21.00, and so on. Ultimately you are in control. Since you don’t need to do your reviews the moment they appear, just choose a convenient time for you and it will all fix itself.
It’s normal but less than ideal. You want to do your early reviews especially as close to their scheduled time as possible. I personally do my lessons in the morning, at about 9, then the first review comes up at around 1 pm, then the next one at 9pm. Because of how things are scheduled, this means, that I get my reviews in from that point on in the afternoon, when I don’t need to worry about work anymore for that day.
Depending on how you like to do your reviews and lessons, the best time to do them will vary. For example, I’m not big on doing all your required lessons at once, so I space them out, doing 35 lessons an hour until I reach the radicals or kanji that need to be learned to progress. This means my reviews fan out a bit.
Don’t be scared of experimenting a bit, try to pinpoint a timeframe when you are mostly free every day, and try doing your lessons 12 hours before that. It will make sure that your reviews come up at good times.
If you do your lessons in the morning (or are able to) I find it all sorts its self out perfectly with reviews following for the day.
I’ve found the more items I unlock, the more frequent reviews come available, to a point where I get reviews for many different hours of the day. And I don’t think it’s really healthy to be doing reviews every hour. So I have about two sessions a day where I go through a stack of them that have built up. Usually in the morning, to clear the ones that came in the night, and the evening, to clear the ones that came during the day. Sometimes if I’m bored I’ll do another session in the middle. So I guess what I’m trying to say is, you’re probably always going to get stuff appearing when your schedule can’t fit them in, but you do have the ability to manage them when it fits you. And maybe do lessons at the start of your day so that you’ll see them again multiple times that same day, rather than them appearing at night.
The thing is, I got up today at 3am to work, and there was one review left over from last night (the one at 10pm). I did that review, and then I had nothing for 7 hours. I’m still waiting for my next review, at 10am…7 hours after I started my day.
I understand that as time goes by there will be more and more reviews, so this will be less of an issue, but here at the (re)start, the scheduling does seem to be tied to the time on my local computer. Otherwise, why not schedule reviews for 3am and 4am? It’s only scheduling reviews for 10am to 10pm (local time). Unfortunately, these are not the hours I’m active.
The reviews aren’t tied to a timezone, they’re based on how many hours have passed.
You don’t have reviews at 1pm and 5pm, you have reviews 4 hours and 8 hours after you did them last.
You could tell the system that you changed timezones and want them at another time instead, but it’s either getting them earlier, which defeats the purpose, or getting them later, which you can do by ignoring them when they come out.
If I should be getting reviews every four and eight hours, there must be something wrong. I just did my first review of the day at 10am and a follow-up at 11am, and now my next review is scheduled for 9am tomorrow…22 hours later. Is that normal?
I’m not trying to be obnoxious, I just can’t figure out what the pattern in supposed to be, and I’m impatient to get back into learning.
The more you review an item, the longer the delay between the time you see it becomes. If you’re reviewing items that you’ve been seeing already, then they will take longer than 4 or 8 hours to come back again. The timings for each level an item can be in are listed here, hopefully this helps.
WaniKani’s SRS Stages | WaniKani Knowledge.
So the more times you get an item correct in a row, the longer the time will be between you seeing it again. Soon, you’ll get more lessons which will start at shorter intervals again until you get them correct a few times.
My advice is, don’t stress too much about the exact time reviews come in. For example, say that you have 10 reviews “due” at 2pm and 15 reviews “due” at 5pm. But let’s also assume that you only do reviews every night at 10pm, because that’s what time works for your schedule in this hypothetical scenario. Then, the reviews you are doing at 10pm are the reviews that have accumulated throughout the day (so you would be doing 25 reviews at 10pm). The next day would be the same, there are some number of reviews that came in throughout the day (doesn’t matter what specific time they appeared) and you’d do them all at 10pm.
Basically, do review sessions when it’s convenient for you. I usually do a review session in the morning (when I do the reviews that accumulated overnight) and another in the evening (when I do the reviews that accumulated throughout the day). I just let the SRS software worry about everything else. If you’re interested in the review intervals the SRS uses, you can look at the link posted by the person before me.
If you’re a low level you might not be getting reviews as often because you don’t have as many flashcards in the mix yet. But as time goes on you’ll get reviews coming in pretty much constantly (assuming you do lessons consistently).
Hope this helps, I tried my best to explain so hopefully it made sense!
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