I need help! I am just at level 5 and I review on a daily basis. I have been noticing that if I don’t review throughout the day, the number of reviews keep piling up to a point that I have everyday up to 133 reviews. That takes almost an hour every day and, even my hands get tired to type. Besides, I can spend three consecutive days without any new words and it is becoming frustrating because the estimated time for the level to be over, sometimes, does not go down throughout the days.
I am sure that there is a way to both reduce the number of reviews on a daily basis, focus on the current level and (no going over the previous one) and getting new kanji on a daily basis.
You need to reduce you daily number of lessons to keep the number of review under control. If you do all lessons as soon as they are available these lessons will become reviews and cause an overload.
The trick is to keep an eye on the number of apprentice items and stop doing lessons when this number is high and resume lessons when the number is low. The recommended limit is 100 but if you overload at 133 items you should probably aim for a lower number such as 75 or even 50. You should try 75 and if you still overload with reviews go down to 50.
The logic is the bulk of reviews is for apprentice items. If you keep them under control the total workload will be controlled as well.
I agree with prouleau, I would recommend lowering the default items you do in a day. You can go drastic with this (I have my default on 3), as it feels a lot better to do more than to do less. This helps to to not have too many items.
Secondly, I suspect you have quite a lot of leaches, it might be worth looking into https://wanilog.com and look into what is halting your progress. As an example, my reading accuracy is very low, even sticking at 76% in the burned stage! While my meaning is good (going to about 95% at burned). This led me to use https://www.kaniwani.com/ as this specifically focuses on meaning → reading. While I am not using it that long, my accuracy climbed by 5% immediately (not visible in stats yet, but now I am in the ‘learning zone’).
If you want you can also post your stats, look at what your leaches are etc. From here you can also make more specific questions and train your leaches more so they progress.
Thanks for the response. I definitely need to slow down the pace because, though I find this system useful to memorize kanjis, at this pace, I will burnout. So, I use different devices and not only rhe wanikani website but also the tsurukame app and I don’t know what the difference is between the two of them but they look different.
I should focus on the leeches. Now, I changed the number of reviews to up to 50 and I currently have 103. Do you know why?
Also, the remaining days, mine has not changed though I review everyday. I am still 35 vocab words to learn and they are still blocked. When there a new lessons, it usually give two or three which is nothing for me.
Thanks for the response. I definitely need to slow down the pace because, though I find this system useful to memorize kanjis, at this pace, I will burnout. So, I use different devices and not only rhe wanikani website but also the tsurukame app and I don’t know what the difference is between the two of them but they look different.
I should focus on the leeches. Now, I changed the number of reviews to up to 50 and I currently have 103. Do you know why?
Also, the remaining days, mine has not changed though I review everyday. I am still 35 vocab words to learn and they are still blocked. When there a new lessons, it usually give two or three which is nothing for me
I’ve never used tsurukame, however if they do a similar thing it is useful to try to focus on one first, depending on what you want to learn. I think WaniKani is one of the best for Kanji/Vocab, but you will not learn grammar from it for example.
Leeches directly correspond to more reviews. Remember that if you get it wrong it drops a level, meaning you will see it at least 2 additional times than when getting it right. I therefore suggest you first do not take any new lessons until your reviews are a manageable level for you. You can use the clock button to stop reviews to stop halfway, which can help you to get through the pile.
New lessons are unlocked when the previous ‘tier’ is at guru stage (4 times correct). Radicals unlock Kanji, Kanji unlock Vocab. This is also important when doing lessons; even though you add three, you will see 12 reviews from this the coming days (minimum). This is why I suggest to focus on your reviews first, make sure there is space for you to work on it. After that continue adding new items while remembering the 4x review.
Lastly, you can do it! It is though now, however when you schedule yourself properly you can back to a rithm that works for you. Take your time to process the leaches, and continue from there.
Is kaniwani.com a site related to wanikani? I’m at level 7 and have been doing wanikani for 102 days consecutively. Every time I come to the forum I hear about things related to the website that seem like some giant secret that everyone seems to know about except me.
Wanikani has an API and is fairly popular, so a pile of things have been made that use the API. Wanikani is made by https://www.tofugu.com, everything else is some other entity that isn’t related to them and uses the API to do something with Wanikani data. API And Third-Party Apps - WaniKani Community is a whole section of the forum dedicated to a bunch of these services.
Kaniwani is a vocabulary focused SRS system that uses audio for the prompts so that people can’t “cheat” by using the displayed kanji to know the reading / meaning. Similar things can be setup with Wanikani userscripts and work from the Wanikani page if you’d rather go that way, but it takes a bit of setup.
Wanilog is a newer Wanikani stats site that is starting to have a bunch of features. Something you may be interested in is that it can show level projections and how to do your reviews for target workloads.
KaniWani is not related to WaniKani, it does use WaniKani’s API as explained in Sylaris’s post. I fully agree with what he is saying there with the caveat what KaniWani does. WaniKani does Kanji → Meaning and Kanji → Reading. KaniWani does Meaning → Reading, which means you have to recall the reading without the assist of the Kanji. As far as I am aware it has no audio option, or I just missed that. For me this helps me a lot, because I have a meaning accuracy above 90% but a reading accuracy below 80%.
Ah, you’re probably right. I haven’t used it, I just remember looking at it before and not caring about it too much because I have userscripts setup (and other things) that can do the same thing. I must have just thought it was also audio first and not just kanji first at some point as I had my userscript stuff setup to practice like that.
