So, I’m a student learning Japanese purely in my free time. Having just started my WK journey, I read the famous Journey of 368 Days post and got to the schedule part. However, being a student means I have school, 8:30am to 3:30pm almost every day, plus half an hour in either direction for commuting.
While I do have a mostly consistent period of free time from 8:30am-10am and 12pm-2pm (I have free periods that I act as a Teacher’s Aide for) every other day, I obviously can’t consistently stick to a 9am-9pm schedule perfectly timed with the SRS intervals. Is just checking WK whenever I can and doing the best “schedule” I can get with this, or is there some secret trick?
The seceduling part from my understanding is to efficiently do wanikani or reviews to minimize lost time. This is idle for people speed running™️. While for others it could be helpful still. But it is not a law neither it is requirement for the program.
I myself only do it 3 times on occasion more often than not only twice a day. What is important is being consistent.
Conclusion:
It is good idea to follow but not necessary.
Speed aside, hitting the intervals really only matters for idiots like me that struggle with new items early on. There are some people here who are fine just doing things once a day. Don’t stress it.
There is a secret trick in that there are some awesome 3rd party mobile apps hidden away in the forums. They’re at the bottom of the first post in this thread. So if that morning commute is on public transit you could always do mobile lessons/reviews at that time and even without internet access if your app supports it.
Also WK is easier on an X lessons/day schedule, probably between 10-20. I’ve seen a few who do big batches, but I think most people do not as their levels increase. With a reorder script or the right settings on the app it’s relatively easy to just slide in a short 20ish item review session in a couple minutes after lunch. You don’t have to do all of your reviews as soon as possible, but try to get them done daily.
It’s a good idea to try and hit the first review at 4hrs after the lesson as close as possible, it really helps with retention. The second review can be a bit more flexible but should be done relatively close too. Everything past that isn’t a big deal to be off by a bit.
I worked a full time job up to around level 30-40 and just fit it around my work schedule as best as possible. I did one review session in the morning before work and one if the evening before bed. I’d do lessons shortly after work so the first review would be ready before I went to bed. Sometimes I’d have to work late and I’d just do the lessons along with my reviews instead. As long as you’re doing reviews at least twice a day and clearing your review queue you should be fine.
When I first started Wanikani, my schedule was like this:
Reviews and lessons at 5pm,
a small review session (only the items learned that day) at 9pm,
and a longer session at 7am.
This worked extremely well for me until my weekly schedule became a lot less consistent due to getting a part-time job, having a much larger workload, etc.
Now it’s more like:
Reviews and lessons anywhere between 4-6pm (preferably at 5pm), a smaller review session anywhere between 9-10pm and a larger review session anytime in the morning (usually 7am-11am, preferably around 7am).
I’m also a student, which means around exam time and due dates it becomes a lot harder to keep up with reviews. But make doing Wanikani a consistent habit ingrained into your daily schedule, and it’ll be easier to continue, especially when your motivation is at its lowest. Hope this helps!
Many people (me included) find that their retention suffers if they don’t hit the 4 hour and 8 hour intervals for new items, so I think it’s a little more than optional for many of us. You might be lucky, though, and not have as many problems.
If you do want to try to optimize it, there are two main ways to fit WK around your regular schedule. The first way is doing your lessons in the morning, then do your reviews 4 hours later (during your lunch break, perhaps), then doing them again at night 8 hours later. This may or may not work for you, depending on your schedule during the day.
The second way is to do your lessons at some point after you get home from school/work, let’s say 6pm, then do your reviews at 10pm before bed, then again at 6am when you wake up (you can adjust earlier/later depending on when you go to bed and wake up). With this schedule, you don’t have to worry at all about doing WK during your school/work day.
This seems like prime time for you to do your WaniKani reviews. Maybe plan your SRS-stages around getting your reviews done on these 2 times slots primarily. Mostly to get a routine going though. There is really no need to stick to a strict schedule to do WK.
I almost always do one session per day, in the morning. Sometimes if I’m itching to level up faster I’ll add another session, or two if I can manage it. I study Japanese in a lot of other ways from WK, so I don’t have tons of extra study time to be doing multiple WK sessions every day.
You definitely don’t have to do multiple sessions per day. If you are having trouble with retention it might help, but there are also other ways to support retention, such as exposure to native material (books, shows, etc).
When I started WaniKani I used to do 3 sessions per day (breakfast, lunch, evening). Later on I reduced it to 2 per day (breakfast and evening). I think the bigger problem is that with WaniKani’s schedule you have to hit those 4 and 8 hour checkpoints, because that’s how it’s set up. One can’t skip them.
From a more practical view, I think it’s okay to do 1+ sessions per day. If you do your lessons slowly and carefully, that initial 4 hour block is not super important. From doing both WaniKani and Anki, it’s the much later blocks that span days that are more tricky and when you might see a drop in accuracy.
To gauge how good you’re doing you can also try doing 3 sessions/day and if you see your accuracy is very high (ballpark of 95-100%) for the initial intervals, you could be okay with 2 sessions/day.
