Level 4 advice

WaniKani
39

You can start quite simple, actually:

The first concept to consider is the number of items currently at Apprentice level. This is seen by many as an abstract number of your current workload, because A) these items are still fresh and B) it indirectly determines how many Guru/Master/Englightened reviews you will have later on.
The second concept to consider is the number 4. Every item you finish a lesson for will appear four times in Apprentice reviews (assuming an accuracy of 100%).
The third, and last, concept to consider is your actual accuracy. This one is hard to get an actual number on, so you have to eyeball it and adjust as you go.

To put these together:

  1. Pick a target Apprentice count (i.e. target workload). I usually see 100 - 120 on the forums, I use 100 personally. This is your “budget”.
  2. Determine how much of your budget you want to reserve for failed items. In my case, it’s 20%.
  3. Divide the remainder of the budget by 4. This is the amount of lessons you can do per day to stay within your budget. In my case, that’s 80 / 4 = 20 items.
  4. If your Apprentice count at a given day doesn’t allow for a full set of lessons, you only do as much as your budget allows.

And that’s all you need for a basic lessons schedule:

  • 20 lessons per day, which amounts to 80 Apprentice items at any given time
  • 20 “reserve items” for anything that failed a review

You’ll also need a review schedule:

(The first 2-3 levels are an exception to this, as they have faster SRS intervals than the rest of WaniKani)

  1. Pick a time of the day X (e.g. 9am). That’s where you do your lessons. Some items that fell back to Apprentice 2 or lower during review will also end up here.
  2. The first review will appear at X + 4 (1pm). This one is really short, as it only includes the items from the lesson earlier.
  3. The second review will appear at X + 12 (9pm). This is the time slot where the bulk of your items will stay.
  4. Reviews that appear in between these slots are ignored until the next planned time slot. Otherwise you’ll end up with a schedule where you have to do reviews for 5-6 items every other hour, interrupting pretty much everything else in your life. (There are people that do this and I did this when I started WaniKani, because I had the time for it, but I don’t recommend it as a regular schedule)

You only need to determine X so that these three events fit into your daily schedule. Another popular one is something like [5pm, 9pm, 7-9am]. Usually it’s fine to stretch the second interval (X + 12) a bit, but you’ll need to experiment, if it works for you.

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