Hello everyone!
I have a bit of a predicament. I am working at a summer camp starting on the 31st on a week-by-week basis. I can’t bring my laptop and I’m not allowed to use my phone for long periods of time while I’m up there. This means I won’t be able to do reviews for three months straight, excepting weekends. Plus I probably wont have time to do reviews on the weekends when I start work because I will be busy. Currently I have my subscription cancelled when the month ends. I am also around 600 reviews behind but I’m trying to catch up again.
My question is what should I do about retaining information? Is it worth catching up on reviews this last week and a half or should I just wait till I start up again in the fall? Is vacation mode beneficial or would I be cheating myself? How much will I forget over the summer? Have any of you been in a similar situation, and what did you do about it?
tl;dr Imma be gone for a while, what do I do about reviews?
If you are the same person I remember from that other thread and you are allowed to look at printed stuff then I would:
1.) Use some export, e.g. https://wanikanitoanki.com/ and then format the .csv file in some spreadsheet software (Google Docs, Excel, whatever you got) into a list that is nice enough to look at when printed. Then repeatedly go through that list, covering one of the columns. Mark the ones I don’t know, mark them again after each run, maybe write the ones I don’t know down on a separate list. This is much faster than regular WaniKani reviews so maybe you can find some time to do that every day?
2.) Definitely enable vacation mode because I would hate to be hit in the face with a huge pile of reviews when coming back. In my opinion, the risk of being frustrated and falling off the wagon is too high. Other people see it differently, that depends on your personality. You could always switch it off on the weekend to get some of your accumulated reviews done if you can’t get it down to 0 until then. And then not forget to turn it back on after the weekend.
People also suggest the Iversen method but I’m too lazy (let’s call it busy…) for all that writing
I’ve been away from WK for nearly a year (again), and just came back properly about a week ago. I hadn’t seen the need to enable vacation mode, so when I came back I was confronted with 1800+ reviews.
But you know, even if you get a huge pile of reviews waiting for you when you return, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The pile - which you consequently fail to clear or get near an even remotely decent “correct answer” -rate (mine is hovering at 65% currently), it is only that much better at acting as a review tool to bring back what you’ve forgotten.
Personally I don’t mind at all. Most of the piled up reviews are enlightened stuff, that only need one more correct answer for them to be burned - or actually stuff I have no memory about - so either way it’s been really good to shave the pile smaller bit by bit. Today I went down to 1400+ reviews, by doing just about 100 revs a day. Big thanks belongs also to WK’s settings, where you can choose to do lower level items first, instead of all shuffled like in the ol’ days. THANKS @koichi さん達
TL;DR: No need to stress or rigorously plan for anything imho. The SRS will act in your favour, even if you take a break.
