Hi, looking for guidance. I’ve been beginning to feel overwhelmed by the Review system. I’m only level 6 and feeling like I am on the struggle bus so early is really demotivating. I haven’t been able to learn anything new in over a month. Perhaps my method of working through the system is flawed.
So far, I’d spend 1-2 hours every morning doing reviews and learning 40 pieces of new content (until I get Review blocked). Then later in the day I’d catch up on new Reviews and re-do the lessons I learned to help cement it.
However, even since I hit level six, the reviews number over 100 as soon as I wake up and it takes me too long to get through them. I run out of time in my morning routine to take in anything new, and after work, I’m hit with another large bulk of Reviews. I end up mentally exhausted and skip trying to learn something new. This has left me in this endless loop of Reviews and I’ve found myself increasingly activating Vacation mode to get away from it. In fact, I’m currently in Vacation Mode as I write this.
The level-up email I got at level six did forewarn an uptick in difficulty and admittedly, I’ve been a bit busier in life recently, but I feel like they don’t account for my stagnation entirely. I’ve also been out of formal studies for a long time so re-learning “how to learn” on a rigorous schedule is potentially a factor.
How do those of you in higher levels handle increasing Reviews + learning new content? What other strategies are there for balancing the two? I also saw another thread where commenters were discussing picking and choosing Reviews by proficiency - was a bit unclear on this.
I don’t want to give up on learning Japanese, I have specific goals in mind, but I feel myself slipping in determination.
You regulate the amount of reviews you get by the amount of lessons you do. Whenever you start getting too much reviews, it’s recommended to stop doing lessons until your reviews become manageable again at your preferable pace.
Sorry, I hope this was at least a bit helpful…
In any case, best of luck with your studies!
It seems you got overwhelmed by trying to do too many lessons.
80% of the work of a Spaced Repetition System (which Wanikani is) is the Review part where you review what you have learned in regular intervals until you get it right so often that it’s no longer necessary to review.
My approach was always to do 10 lessons per day, which left me on a nice comfortable amount of reviews. However, I’m deliberately going slow. From what I’ve heard, there are plenty of people who do more lessons per day than me. But of course, those people have to deal with appropriate review amounts.
I always say: Your goal is not to go fast and burn out. It’s to be consistent. If you’re consistent, you’ll eventually reach your goal.
Edit: Oh, and activating vacation mode will not solve your problems. In fact, it will cause you to forget stuff since it disrupts the specific timings when Wanikani gives you new reviews. My advice: You don’t have to complete all the reviews as they come up. Meaning you’ll get them wrong, leading to more reviews.
You can just do some of your reviews whenever you have time, on your phone, and use the “wrap up” button to end the review session after 10 more items. I just do a few reviews when I have some spare time on the train, or when waiting in line. Of course I also have regular review sessions.
FWIW, I found no more than 10 lessons to be the right amount from level 5 to about 50. For me that keeps 100 or fewer items in apprentice and 300 or fewer in guru. Anymore than that and I’d get burned out.
Your mileage may vary, but try paying attention to these numbers and you’ll figure out a speed that works for you.
Hi, I’m only at level 2 because I’m starting over after a 4+ year break! Take a look at where you are right now and which Radicals/Kanji/Vocabulary you feel are solid and which are weak for you. Stop doing lessons for a few days until you get a grip on things and catch up with your reviews.
If you feel like there are a jillion reviews for things that you barely remember or they are all new things from your current level, consider moving back a level and see if that helps. once you get a good grip on levels 1-5 then you can start doing lessons a bit more slowly so you can keep up with reviews.
One thing I remember from before when I was at level 10-11 was I was not focusing on the vocabulary since they don’t level you up. But they really help solidify the kanji for you and make a more comprehensive learning. So make sure you don’t have a bunch of old levels vocab to catch up on–it just bites you in the behind later.
Yeah, it definitely sounds like you’ve overloaded yourself - 40 new items a day is a lot! I’ve reset to level 1 twice now, both times from somewhere in the mid-level 30s, so as I work through the material a third time, just about everything I’ve seen before. And I still only do, on average, about 15 items per day. My resets were both at least in part because I too was trying to do much each day, and eventually burned out.
I think there are a couple things I would suggest:
Experiment a bit to see what seems manageable for you. Some people suggest keeping an eye on the number of apprentice items or average number of reviews per day, and not doing new lessons anytime you get above that number. What counts as manageable depends on the person, of course, so you’d need to figure out what works for you.
Lower the number of lessons you do per day. Like I said, 40 is a lot! And just to warn you, once you start getting Master/Enlightened/Burn reviews, the review count is going to grow even more than it already is now at level 6. You definitely want to work out a lesson plan you can manage sustainably before that happens.
Other people have suggested stopping new lessons entirely until you get the reviews under control - if you can, I agree with that. If you’re like me, though, not doing any new lessons at all is very demotivating! So, in that case, I would say just minimize the lessons - only do 2 or 3 per day, maybe. You can still feel like you’re progressing, but you won’t be piling on too much additional work.
You don’t actually have to do all of your reviews when you get them! By that, I mean that if you have 100 reviews first thing in the morning, and working through all of them means you never get to do anything new - don’t do all of the reviews! Do your 2 or 3 new items first, maybe, and then get through as many reviews as you can. Do small numbers of reviews in multiple sessions over the course of the day. Or just set an arbitrary number of reviews, say 50 or 60, that you do each morning, and once you’ve done that number, move on and leave the rest for later.
Warning for #4 - You’ll end up falling off the SRS schedule, which will likely make you get more reviews wrong, at least for a while. This also may actually increase the total available number of reviews temporarily. That can also be demotivating! But as long as you’re adding only a minimal amount of new material, you’ll eventually start remembering things, get the reviews correct, and move items out of the daily review pile, at which point things will start coming back under control.
Picking which reviews you do based on what level they’re in might be helpful for you, but I believe that is only possible with user scripts. I don’t use user scripts at all, so I don’t know much about them. I know there are other threads that discuss how to set them up if you search the forums, though.
The relationship between lessons and reviews not an obvious one. The idea is that you do fixed amount of lessons every day, and over time, as those same learned items come back after a day, two, than week, two weeks, month, and eventually four months, you get gradually more reviews. But it should go up only slowly. I even made a post about my observation:
You shot yourself in the foot by doing too many lessons, without knowing how the future reviews will haunt you. Even worse, you went over your ideal amount, and reached very high fail rate. Here is a topic that explains how much MORE workload that adds:
OK, so how to handle it?
you can stop doing lessons, although I think you should still do at least few (1-5) to keep the habit
you don’t need to do all reviews in one go, there is a “wrap up” button that ends review session early, use it when you get tired, than do more later
you can also reset your level to lower number to return some reviews back and redo lessons again, this time slower, you don’t need to go all the way to level 1
And here are some indicators to watch out for into the future:
success rate after review session, aim at 90-95%, if it is low, reduce number of lessons
number of items in apprentice level (once everything settles down) should be around 7-10 times the number of lessons you are doing every morning, if this goes up, take less lessons until it goes down
you don’t need to do reviews as they come up, it is OK to let them wait until you have time, but you should do reviews at least 2-3 times per day
any change will have noticable effect in about a week, don’t expect changes the next day
Keep in mind that slow and steady wil get you much further. This journey will take you years, no need to rush. Good luck.
[cough] what?! 40 lessons a day is too much. You don’t want to do that many, and even if you did, you can’t (on average).
You don’t want to because as you’ve discovered, your review work load is going to be 8-10 times that (worse if you have a high failure rate).
You can’t because there are about 150 items in a level, and you can’t do a level faster than 7 days. So your average rate is going to max out at 20-ish per day. Might as well smooth it out over the days so your mind can absorb fewer things, better, at a constant rate rather than batch dumps you’re only going to retain some fraction of.
I strongly, strongly recommend using the “today’s lessons” feature to do 15 per day until you start getting some burned. Then, if you want to get clever increasing the rate or changing the vocab/kanji/radical mix, then by then you know what you’re doing (to yourself). And I’d still say change the rate slowly, because the workload effect is amplified and delayed, so you don’t get immediate feedback on “I’ve made a terrible mistake”.
Now you’re in a jam, because even if you stop doing lessons today, the reviews are only going to decrease in a half-life kind of way, not immediately. Everyone’s different, but what I would do is cut it to 5 lessons per day and just tough it out for the next few weeks - after that your workload should be about half what it is now.
This is what my reviews schedule looks like at a pretty consistent 15-lessons-per-day. I’ve already done a bunch today, that would normally be higher than the second day, note that it’s over 100. That’s normal. If over 100 is starting to be too much time for you, definitely do not try to go faster
I’d also add a small thing: I’m not sure if you’re doing your reviews on a laptop or mobile - for me, I only do reviews on my laptop (bar the occasional long train/bus journey) because I’m a lot faster and make way less typos than on my phone so I can recommend trying that if you’re not doing reviews on a computer already!
Personally, I also just fail a review if the answer doesn’t come to me within seconds. Unsure if that’s recommended or not, but it ensures a certain speed going through larger amounts of reviews and it also hammers in the kanji and vocab I clearly don’t know off the bat by the increased repetition.
If you install and use the kana flick keyboard on the phone, it tends to cut down on the typos a lot (AND help the speed eventually, but that will be much worse for the time it takes to learn and get good at it)
Can’t help with the annoyance of having to switch to QWERTY for every meaning, and then kana for every reading, but at least on my phone it’s one button tap.
Ok here is one thing I seem to be doing differently from everyone else, perhaps it might work for you too:
I am not doing a fixed amount of lessons a day. I do lessons until I am somewhere between 130 and 150 apprentice items. Then I am just doing reviews until I drop the apprentice items to about 100. This can be a few days where I am not doing any new lessons at all. Then when I am at about 100 apprentice items I add 30 to 50 new items and so on.
For what it’s worth, I also heavily use the lesson picker, in which I handpick well, really mouse-pick the lessons I want to learn. My strategy is to:
Do the radicals first during the level up day
Do the Kanjis on the next few days (or if you can still learn on the first day of level up, that’s ok)
Do the vocabs of the previous level and pick the vocabs that have the same/similar kanjis
Do the vocabs of current level and pick the vocabs with similar kanjis
Doing #3-#4 ensures that I learn the same kanji readings for the set of vocabulary in that lesson session. Not sure if it will affect my recall or recognition in the future, but this somewhat helps me remember them quickly during reviews, even if the vocabs get randomized in review order. This also helps with the mental workload of learning vocabs - it makes it easier for me to take the lesson in, as opposed to a mix of radical/kanji/vocab in a single lesson session.
I absolutely agree with picking the similar kanji and vocab. Then you get immersed in that kanji and I think you get the hang of which pronunciation to use faster with fewer errors. I’m trying to remember but I don’t think they had the lesson picker or the extra reviews when I was doing this several years ago and they are a big help.
I started back in 2018 in my other account and I didn’t notice that lesson picker thing. I also didn’t know about userscripts back then so I just did what WK set up for me for that day. That’s all right for the first few levels I guess, but after level 4, I found it hard to remember the vocabs, which made me panic in reviews and forgot the mnemonics. I realized it’s easier to group the same types of lessons than a randomized session.
