Hey everyone, trying WaniKani for the first time. I read about the spaced repetition system, but after reading it I realized I recall the shapes and meanings of certain radicals well before it’s officially review time. Does this “mini review” affect the effectiveness of SRS method or is this taken into account with the learning method?
I don’t think its cheating. But even if it were you won’t be able to keep this practice bcz time period between review would increase to months, And your work load would increase rapidly, you won’t even be able to properly list out all of your current level radicals let alone for older levels.
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I don’t think it is cheating or relevant either. I also do this for new kanji and radicals so that I don’t get them wrong and have to wait longer until I can level up.
The vocab is what really counts in my opinion anyway. And the radicals will be reenforced automatically all the time because they are used in the kanji and the kanji will be reenforced because they are used in the vocab.
And at least as I understand it, SRS is about maximizing efficiency: how much time can pass between reviews while still learning new information efficiently? It is not about absolutely having no contact at all with that information in the meantime. Otherwise you should ideally not learn any vocab or read anything while doing WK because it would mess up the WK SRS 
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Are you Bananaken by chance? Your username sounds very familiar …
I don’t think its cheating doing it. Later on you will read a lot and thats when you do lots of “mini reviews”
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There’s no such thing as cheating in learning, short of actually looking up the answers instead of answering them yourself.
Some people are true SRS purists, some believe in reviewing as often as possible, most are in-between. What will work for you isn’t necessarily what will work for others.
For the most part, I let the SRS do its thing but I’m not totally dedicated to its timeline. If I just happen to remember something before review time, well that implies I must know it pretty well and was likely to get it right at the assigned time anyway. I also do a skim over my current level’s apprentice kanji quite a few times outside of the SRS schedule, although I don’t actually check if my guesses are correct. I leave it to the SRS to tell me if I had it wrong. And I never bother to pre-study vocab anymore, though I did it a lot in the first couple levels.
Soon enough you’re going to want to use your studies here to start reading things in Japanese, and you’re frequently going to come across kanji and vocab you’ve not yet burned. That’s not cheating, that’s using what you learned for its intended purpose.
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Makes sense, I guess there’s not much yet for me to think about so I had some thoughts on the implications of using this system 
thanks!
I’ve been found out… 
I guess I’ll just get a feel for what works best for me between lessons and reviews once there’s a lot more content to juggle in my head.
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It just means you’re able to remember the item on your own outside of lesson and review time. Which is exactly what you want to happen in the long run, so you should be glad it’s happening. 
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