I use Duolingo to study Italian and I think that their streak feature is very motivating. It’s a counter that keeps track of how many consecutive days you’ve reached a certain study goal. The streak resets to zero if you miss a day.
Sometimes this encourages me to find time for study on days when I’m very busy or feel tired. I don’t want to break the streak! Simple, silly, and ruthlessly effective.
Koichi has written before about the motivational power of the streak (“30 Days of Japanese Learning”, I think). So I’m surprised that there’s no feature on WaniKani like this. I would certainly find it useful.
I think this is a great idea if this is configurable in some way, or is more than just a counter for days where any amount of studying has been done. The main reason Wanikani is working for me is the gamification of it. Leveling up and having a clear end goal is rewarding.
Although I’m probably in the minority in this, when such a feature comes to fruition, I’ll probably be requesting that someone write a script to hide it from me. lol
While I agree that the drive to keep up a streak can be motivating, I’ve always seen this sort of thing as a double-edged sword. Personally, I’ve often had the downer from losing a long streak (due to life, circumstances, whatever) become more of a demotivator than actually keeping the streak provided in motivation,
It’s true that if you start to feel burned out, the last thing you should do is to keep doing reviews just to “not break the streak”. I’ve found that a short break of one or two days every now and then (probably once or twice a month) is good.
Maybe if you could set the parameters for your own personal streak? For example, I’m trying to review 50 words a day — doesn’t matter if they were answered correctly or incorrectly, just that at the end of the day they were taken out of the queue for a time. For someone else, it might be “burn __ words” or “level up __ words” or “practiced until I got __ words wrong” or “practiced until I got ___ words correct.”
It would be nice to have that kind of control over a feature like this. Anyway, even in a rough or rudimentary form, this could help me.
In one of my small WaniKani-related projects (WaniKani Daily Digest), I included a streak counter in the daily email that’s sent.
The way I calculate it for the app is by checking yesterday’s stats compared to the current stats (the app saves the stats once a day). If they’re different in any way, it means that you did something in WaniKani the previous day, which updates the counter. This is the only way I could do it given the data that’s accessible via the API.
@Dorotheian: yes, it would be important to set the parameters for your own streak.
But I agree with @plantron that constant study without healthy breaks can overload you quickly.
On Duolingo they have currency called “lingots” that you earn by leveling up, completing study units, and maintaining a streak of seven days. You can then use these lingots to “freeze the streak”, so you can take days off while still staying in the streak system. As long as I study consistently, I earn enough lingots to freeze my streak once a week, or sometimes twice in a pinch.
I also use an app called Productive that lets you set the number of times a week you want to achieve a goal. So if I want to work out at the gym four times a week and I’ve only gone twice so far, it says “Great job! Two to go!” I can complete those two workouts any time before the week has ended and then I keep up my streak, even though I didn’t go every day, nor consecutively.
I think these systems provide a good balance between maintaining your streak and taking well-deserved breaks.
I’ve used this Daily Digest alot since you released it. The longest streak I got so far was 209 days. Broke it on Christmas Eve, spending quality time with my parents, no regrets <3
My favorite feature is seeing how many items I burned yesterday, since it always motivates me just a little bit extra. Thanks for making it!
As someone with an already very large streak on Duolingo, this would definitely increase my ego. I approve of this suggestion. (I guess it would help with motivation too)