I don’t know what the Wanikani team just did, but it’s obvious that they’ve done something, and I’m honestly kind of freaked out.
In the past, the items that come up during review appeared to be chosen at random out of everything that is currently awaiting review. However, this morning, that clearly wasn’t the case. This morning, it seemed like nearly every single item I had reviewed and missed in the last couple days came up for review again, as well as a lot of items that I reviewed in the last couple days and got right.
You can see that in the screenshot below. I went through them with never-before-seen speed and accuracy because every single review was either something I had reviewed recently or already knew well.
In fact, the screenshot understates it, because that was the final review session stats, and they started mixing in more of the occasional not-recently-reviewed item towards the end, presumably due to running out of recently reviewed items to show me. I had a streak of over 30 before I even missed a single review! I’ve never seen anything like that.
And even more, most of the items I missed below are ones that I did review in the recent past and just still couldn’t remember or misremembered. The only ones that seemed honestly unfamiliar to me were 家賃、弾丸 , and 博打,
I’ve never seen anything like this. Yes I know that even when it is random, you’ll expect a few recently reviewed items to come back up just by chance. I’m used to that. But there’s no possible way that dozens and dozens of recently reviewed items would all come back up at once by chance out of a pool of 4.7k items awaiting review. And even for the reviews that I hadn’t reviewed recently, it seemed like Wanikani was deliberately trying to pick relatively easy ones.
I wish the WK team would chime in to explain what changed.