Hey all, I’m new here, and so far have fallen in love with Wanikani. I’ve never been a fan of Mnemonics (for pretty much no reason) but it’s been helping me quite a bit here. Anyways, I was wondering if you are suppose to study the kanji and vocab outside of the reviews and lessons? I know that the space in between exposure is important, but going from 20 hours to 4 days in between seems like a big jump. Would studying the kanji and vocab you learn in wanikani outside of the reviews be detrimental?
Also, I have a bunch of manga in Japanese that have furigana I got from a yardsale. I was thinking of using them to learn some vocab and whatnot. This shouldn’t be an issue regarding wanikani, right?
I wouldn’t study outside of reviews for the sake of studying them because that will seriously mess up the SRS system, but if you’re just reading Japanese and come across stuff you’re learning, then that’s perfectly fine (because that’s the purpose of this website).
You definitely can if you want to; reviewing more often will always help to cement things in your long term memory. But the system is not designed for this to be necessary, and pretty soon you will have so many new items that it just won’t be possible.
There is a script that can help you do this, Which i use from time to time, especially when first learning kanji. I wouldnt over use it, because the SRS system works on it’s own, but every person is different.
I did very frequent reviews of everything I’d unlocked to date for the first few levels, before realizing that the numbers were increasing rapidly and it was no longer viable. Or necessary, really.
These days I do a little reviewing outside of the SRS, but in limited form. I never review vocab outside of the SRS (except unintentionally while reading manga). I do review the radicals and kanij on my current level when the mood strikes me though. The catch is, I don’t (well, “almost never”) check if I’m right or wrong. If I’m wrong, I let the SRS inform me of that during a review.
I mostly do these non-SRS reviews to get a sense of how close I am to leveling. I’ve been speeding up the last few levels (though I plan to take 19 a few days slower) and I like to get a feel for when I should start churning through any vocab lessons I’ve got backed up. I don’t want to have more than a few previous-level vocab lessons sitting untouched when a new level hits.
That would seem like a big jump. But it doesn’t do that.
4 hours > 8 hours > 1 day > 2 days > 1 week > 2 weeks > 1 month > 4 months
(note, every time from 1 day and on is actually that amount of time minus one hour)
I’m not sure where you saw the 20 hours to 4 days thing, though there are a bunch of conflicting timelines mentioned in various places.
Interesting. Mine went 1 Hour > 4 Hours > 22 Hours > 4 Days for the very first set of radicals. My Kanji has been more consistent with what you’ve said.
As for horusscope’s Japanese, it doesn’t really matter since most people that are new to this site probably can’t understand a lick of it anyways haha.
EDIT: Actually, the line you quoted kind of reminds me of a manga character.
Ah, right, the first 2 levels are a different timeline, but I still think you’ve got that 4 day one wrong or something wrong somewhere, because you can get to level 2 in less than 4 days total.
I mean that I don’t think there are any gaps of that length like you’re recalling (within the first 4 reviews), because the entire first level can be done in less than 4 days.
But in any case, you’ll be using the radicals as you do the associated kanji anyway.
Does anyone have a source where this “messing with SRS” is coming from (it comes up here from time to time)? SRS just recognized that your brain need time to memorize something, so doing 50 reviews in 3 days is less effective than doing 5–10 reviews within one month. It tries to minimize the number of reviews to still remember things. Doing more is still helpful, but the cost/benefit is getting worse.
It only “messes with the SRS” when it comes directly at the end of a long gap.
If I have a burn review coming up tomorrow, and I review the item, and I didn’t know it at the time of the early review, it makes no sense to burn it. Though, if you review it and you did know it, then it’s not that big of a deal.
Hmm in that case, yes, if you do something directly correlated to WK and have bad timing then you can mess things up. That is a quite special case, and it shouldn’t discourage @AerialSnack from doing more. Read your books, write stuff by hand, write down some sentences with vocab you just learned, look stuff up in dictionary, … Even with the self-study script it is very hard to go wrong, except when you are looking for it (doing self-study just before the WK reviews or similar).