Level 3 and drowning

How do you all keep up?

I’m at about an 85% reading rate and 96% meaning rate and yet my reviews are consuming a rather large amount of my day.

I don’t expect it to easy but so much for the whole hardest part is waiting pitch you get early on.

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How long do you spend for a single review item? You can choose how many reviews you get later on by limiting the number of lessons.

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Do the amount you can do. A few per day. Split your lesson sessions so the reviews don’t bundle up later (as long as you do them on time ). If they do bundle up, do some then break then resume another time. If you’re not in a hurry. Take care!

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A common tactic to keep reviews under control is to limit your max amount of Apprentice items. Apprentice items come back around more quickly than the higher SRS levels, so the fewer Apprentice items you have, the more breathing room you have around reviewing.

I kept my Apprentice queue around max 100 for most of my WK levels, and it has really made sure that my reviews didn’t get out of hand. Especially when I started burning items, which causes quite the up-tick in reviews down the road.

With this method, I also find it easier to notice if items keep falling back to Apprentice, which means I need to take my time to go over certain stuff a bit better. Mistakes being demoted back to Apprentice can bloat the numbers fast.

And as has been mentioned, if you feel like you’re drowning in reviews, perhaps best not to add new lessons until things are back to levels that work for you.

Best of luck!

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I’ll second the sentiment about burning. It’s a bit hard to take action towards because it is such a long term thing, but when it’s 6 months down the line and you got your pace down when suddenly you look at the “reviews next day” count and it’s 300+, you’ll be regretting it.

About reviews and time, honestly just go at whatever pace is comfortable to you. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to get 0 reviews 0 lessons everyday. I really don’t like saying this, but if the workload is too much for you at level 3 then unfortunately it will probably only get worse moving forward. The workload probably triples as you rack up master/enlightened items.

Actually if anyone has that graph that shows the workload across the levels, now would be a good time to post it.

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This is the workload graph. It is not meant to be a discouragement! It is simply a description of how the work builds, and illustrates why it is important to not let extra work build.

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I don’t know how do i keep up, I review all of them as soon as I am able to do so. I don’t like to see any review piling up. I enjoy wanikani a lot which helps me to go I think. I am using Ultime Timeline extension which helps me to see upcoming reviews and so I can adjust myself beforehand. Also I am using heatmap extension which helps me to see previous progress and drives me. In addition to heatmap I am using google docs script which records and charts my progress daily. Also looking by that chart, I feel more motivated.

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Hi, it might be because you take a long time to answer.

I’ve recently used this : WK Reviews: The Final Countdown (userscript)

I must say, it has help going faster. Before I was thinking a long time and sometimes I was losing myself in my thought but not this much now. I’m more constant in my answers’ timing.

I heard people setting it to 10 seconds per answer. But I’m still slower so I set it to 30 seconds even if I know I can do faster, usually less than 20 seconds but I feel psychologically more safe.

And when I’m really focus and in the mood I like to go under 5 seconds. Getting it wrong is fine : if I fail, I’d rather fail it fast.

:wave:

You aren’t used to the process. It eventually gets easier for different reasons (recycled mnemonics, identical spellings, less new radicals).

I think if you’re spending an enormous amount of time when learning new Kanji or vocab, you might not be using mnemonics effectively. One of the main purposes of this website is to teach you the Kanji using mnemonics. If you’re visualizing the mnemonics appropriately, you should be remembering the Kanji and most vocab within a few minutes or even seconds of seeing them. This is another thing that you’ll eventually become better at, like any skill.

In the end, it will get easier, and you can go at any pace you’d like.

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I found the best thing for me was splitting it into 3 twenty minute (ish) sessions throughout the day to try and prevent a constant stream of reviews throughout the day.
There are two popular schedules I’ve come across but you can shift them around a bit to accommodate for your own scheduling needs:

9am lesson, 1pm review, 9pm review,
6pm lesson, 10pm review, 6am review.

I prefer the later as I eat lunch with my students at school so I don’t have time to do a review then.
The basic idea is to sync your reviews with the SRS intervals so you’re clearing them as soon as they appear but you’re not having to do a million reviews spread randomly throughout the day.

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Check out this guide by @jprspereira

Has all kinds of information in it, including how leveling up works, setting a schedule and finding a pace that works best for you. It made a massive difference in my WK experience so I highly recommend reading it.

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Thanks all. I think part of the problem is that my reading percentage is only 85% and that means that items are constantly dropping back and causing review backlogs. I’m currently spending between an hour and two hours a day on the site. I suppose if you put this into perspective, one can not expect to learn anything as difficult as this if only spending 5 minutes a day on the effort.

I’m definitely going to be limiting my lesson consumption in an effort to solidify the reviews before moving forward.

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