It’s that the timing of reviews has no way to be made convenient.
I would kill to be able to plug in times that work for me and have the reviews target those times. I’m available before work, around lunch, and then the afternoon/evening.
So why do I get no reviews all day and then 90-100 all scheduled for 9-10pm at night. Not only is that a wildly inconvenient time, it’s also not good to try to study like this when you’re exhausted.
It feels like someone looked at research that said “x hours between study sessions is ideal” and forgot the fact that everyone studying actually has things in their life to work around.
Reviews aren’t scheduled at a specific time in the day, but instead after a certain amount of time has passed since you reviewed it last. The amount of time depends on the SRS level, but all but the lowest levels are some multiple of 24 hours (minus one hour). That means that if you just do reviews when it’s most convenient for you, that’s when you’ll naturally have most of your reviews come in.
Sadly they’ll never fix this. Every other competing app that is not wanikani has timings work to the user, but wanikani has used the same system forever and punishes you the following day if you can’t do your reviews at the exact same time every single day.
But sadly both the wanikani admins don’t want it, AND you will receive push back from random users here against a basic feature every other SRS app has.
The other srs apps I have used, floflo/koohi and anki didn’t feel much different than my experience on wk when it came to missing reviews. You just add them on to the review pile for the next day.
You make it convenient on yourself by doing the reviews when you are able to, not when they come up. And you aren’t intended to do them all in one shot.
I have the time to do them in the morning lunch after gym etc.
Though personally, I’d love to do all mine in one shot in the morning and just be done with it. I think the intended goal is for you to use SRS properly and wait until just about when you are due to forget the item. Then you try to remember it, and struggling is a positive aspect here and hopefully you do remember or you get knocked down a level in the SRS.
Proper SRS would be for you to do them in 1 day, 2 days…I forget the rest of the pattern. This is actually faster, I think.
I spend the time using self study quiz user script and this has helped me tremendously at memorizing. I think I might be able to squeeze out just a bit more speed than 25 actually.
If the difference between someone remembering a word and not remembering is a 1 hour difference on the same day then they simply don’t know it. I too would like the same as you’ve said. Think its important for the new people like OP to not have expectations that improvements like he suggested will be added.
you can say the same thing about if you don’t remember it on Tuesday then you wouldn’t have remembered it on Monday etc. - it’s not binary - memory is a fuzzy thing which degrades gradually. Sometimes you might “sort of recall it” but you remember it slightly off (e.g. きょう instead of きょ or you slightly alter the meaning or you confuse the meaning of one of the radical with the meaning of the kanji etc.), or - it’s on the tip of your tongue, etc.
it’s a spectrum.
Anyway, i originally also wanted to comment on the “punish” thing but decided not to in order to not sound argumentative, but i also am not sure why you consider it a punishment: you can review whichever amount of things every day - and if i’m not mistaken you can even set the priority of what you are reviewing first —
this means that other than maybe not adhering to precise and “optimal” SRS timings, there isn’t really a difference between doing a review on hour X or hour X+1 or on day Y vs. day Y+1 - it just puts you at an offset (thereby “slowing you down” compared to ideal timings)
if you’re worried about things being accumulated, you can always reduce (or halt) lessons thereby eventually preventing endless accumulation, etc.
I think people might genuinely not understand why you consider it a punishment to have your reviews pushed to the next day for example (as you wanted anyhow, since this is when you’d schedule them if you could) and then do the ones of tomorrow on another day, and so on.
I also use Anki - and i don’t notice any meaningful difference other than in Anki i can set difficulty when answering (but maybe there’s a scheduling feature I’m not aware of?)
That being said — I do agree it could be a great feature to schedule stuff for those who prefer it, but i think in the end it would simply emulate the same thing you could have done yourself without this feature.
Its entirely reasonable that someone could go “beast mode” practice the heck out of their cards and absolutely nail that time gate; especially for the average WK user doing 10-15 cards. Therefore to optimize success at retention its necessary to do extra practice. Its insane that just one glimpse at the card could produce enough change for it to stick reliably. It does not stick for me with one glimpse.
Though, not to be pedantic its:
Apprentice 1 → 4 hours → Apprentice 2
Apprentice 2 → 8 hours → Apprentice 3
Apprentice 3 → 1 day → Apprentice 4
Apprentice 4 → 2 days → Guru 1
Guru 1 → 1 week → Guru 2
Guru 2 → 2 weeks → Master
Master → 1 month → Enlightened
Enlightened → 4 months → Burned
The problem is I had time last night. The site doesn’t say “hey wait, if you do this now I’m gonna lock you out of anything for 24 hours despite the fact that you have time to study tomorrow.”
When I do a review I have no idea if that same stuff is going to be added to the queue two hours from now or 24. I can only see if theres already other things queued.
Its extremely frustrating when I have time to study NOW, but the website is saying “no, you can review them an hour from now, when you’re 30 mins into a 4.5 hour block of work shifts.”
I can totally understand committing to spaced out reviews, but basing those spacings on an arbitrary time period that are never going to match up with someone’s schedule just makes the whole process inconvenient. Let me set 3-4 times for reviews and use those as the times reviews are set.
The site kinda explains it and how to time when to learn new items to get all the early stages (4 hours, 8 hours) windows. You should really look at the wanikani knowledge guide linked by @Pancakes25 on how all of this works to avoid similar frustration in the future. And, since you’re still in the free levels, I recommend reading the guide before committing with a bunch of money. Some people really dislike the inflexibilty of wanikani, so make sure you understand how it works before you make a decision
all (non-guru?) items are accessible to you between reviews as "extra study” if i’m not mistaken.
so if you really want to just “review stuff” earlier than the SRS timing you can, there’s a feature for that. it simply won’t affect your SRS ranking, that’s all.
and then the next time you have some time - you can just “pick up” all the reviews you didn’t get to do on your previous open time window. not ideal, but not terrible either.
if you prefer your SRS ranking to reflect how your memorization works without any “interference”, you can simply do them with a slight delay.
once you get to higher levels and have hundreds of items to go over, this “lack of stuff to review” wouldn’t be such an issue, i reckon.
don’t forget that in the end the goal is to learn japanese - we’re not trying to beat some video game with a highscore or something.
