So as we all know it can be pretty easy for reviews to pile up to high numbers when life gets a little busy or when you’re just not feeling it. Right now the only option I know of to slow down reviews without stopping lessons is vacation mode. However, that is a complete stop and risks you forgetting most of your kanji if you use it for a long time. I wonder how well a moderate vacation mode would work, one that just has your review slow down so when you are on vacation or having a busy week you can still do wanikani just at a slower pace without having to worry about a pile of reviews waiting when you have more free time
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That would be great for me as one of the slow goers here.
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Good idea!
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Definitely a solid concept, though obviously implementation is always something else entirely. I’m in law school now and during the current finals period I have to go on vacation before bed every night because I just can’t afford to wake up to 150 reviews. Unfortunately, when I wake up, I then have to wait for more reviews to pop up. It would be great to wake up to 30-50 each morning rather than having to choose between 0 and 100, but the new counter on the front page is a massive help.
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I have managed to achieve something similar (50 max during lunch, around 80-100 at night) by micro-managing the amount of “Apprentice items” and ALWAYS doing them at the same time.
But believe me that I would be very glad if I could just define how many I want to review each day (50 on a busy day, 100 -130 on a regular day, etc.)
Anki does this, you can set up a max of reviews per day. Its fantastic.
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You don’t have to do all of the reviews as they come up, of course. You can let some of them rest. If you need some control over which (SRS) levels you’re reviewing, use the reorder script, and quit part of the way through sessions.
I don’t think there’s a right way to approach what you’re asking, either - the number of reviews you get in a day is entirely defined by (a) the SRS intervals, and (b) your lesson/review history. Without fiddling with (a), the only way to minimise reviews is to minimise lessons.
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I’m not super new to WK (lvl 19 started 1/2019 so poking along quietly.) I discovered vacation mode when I had to stop for a whole summer -no internet. But when I got back in study mode, I have found vacation mode incredibly useful as a way to pace reviews and lessons to suit my availability. I turn it on and off regularly. Not for great long periods where I do no study at all, but almost every few days (often overnight or if I’m out of the house for a whole day) or so when I need to slow things down so as not to get overwhelmed. It has been really helpful and has increased my pleasure in the whole shebang. If you aren’t under pressure to finish all 60 levels in a certain time, I recommend it.
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I use vacation mode in a similar way. It helps me a lot because my memory and learning work better when I review in smaller chunks.
Here’s how I do it.
- Some days I don’t use vacation mode.
- Sometimes I use vacation mode only at night. I do this after a long day when I get home and have 130-170 review items waiting for me and I need to spend time with my wife and baby, and the kids. I’ll do between 15 and 40 reviews and then use vacation mode to allow me to relax and go to bed.
- My Fridays and Saturdays are often quite busy, so I occasionally start vacation mode on Thursday night after work and then wait until my work week is over on Saturday night before starting up again.
- I usually do much of my reviewing and new lessons on weekends. This is a long weekend in Japan for me, so I’ll be a ‘weekend warrior’, so to speak.
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That would be a nice feature for sure. I also wish there were options for managing an excessive review pile after the fact.
An option to retroactively apply vacation mode after a hectic week of forgetting to do any reviews (or have it automatically turn on if your review count exceeds a specified number), or an option to break the current review pile up into smaller groups that would show up gradually over the course of several days (like putting a pile of 400 reviews back into a queue to have them show up in increments of 30 every 4 hours or something) would be amazing enhancements IMO.
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I’ve started using vacation mode to throttle the pace of reviews when I feel overwhelmed (for me > 125 reviews). I’ll do about 20 reviews and reset vacation mode, repeat at my own pace until I work reviews to 0. I sometimes use KaniWani (set to show only apprentice level) to help me initially learn words or maybe broaden up to guru to try and reduce leeches.
I gladly trade moving fast for reducing my WaniKani anxiety index - plus a side benefit is that during throttle times I am more likely to do thing like write a kangi or work some of the context sentences.
If WaniKani added some throttle options it may be useful for some users, but vacation mode used with third party apps offer rich workaround alternatives that a single app option probably couldn’t match.
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