Since I joined, I was doing 15 lessons per day and always had around hundred lessons in queue, and it was going up all the time. I had to do occasional 30 lesson days to catch up. Or I had to stay on one level too long. I was doing these 30 lesson days as 2 sessions, one in the morning and one around lunch. As a result, I was failing more reviews and ended up having a lot of reviews overall.
Few weeks ago I switched to 20 lessons per day, and today I ran out of lessons… I haven’t seen this image for a while:
Since I do all 20 in the morning, it is less chaotic and I have better results, which leads to surprisingly low amount of reviews, it is usually around 200, often less than that. The difference is staggering.
You can clearly see the chaos before and smooth slightly darker area of last 3 weeks. Review graph is not that obvious, but you can tell that last weeks have a lot of lighter squares:
Anyway, the point is that the balance is very delicate and you should experiment with what suits you best. You may be as surprised with results as I am.
Well done for finding something that works for you. I went the other way and do between zero and five lessons a day
I love your charts. Could you please tell me what user script you are using?
Unfortunately, due to changes to WK API, it can now track only reviews you did while the plugin was installed, so you won’t be able to see your past reviews.
I already mentioned that I was taking longer time on some levels because of this. That is not the point. The point is that by making a small change in my approach, I managed to achieve much more comfortable experience with several positive side effects.
I did realise this afterwards and was going to edit my post. However, since you posted this under tips and tricks I decided to leave it as it is still a valid option. Every approach has it’s tradeoffs and it may not work for you but some people may prefer to go a bit slower over increasing their workload by 33%
Thank you for this post. I’m struggling to maintain a regular x lessons per day schedule. Maybe I’m obsessing a bit too much over the context sentences. So I’ve been wondering how much time other users spend on their lessons. How long does it usually take you to study a 5-vocabulary batch? Many thanks ahead of time for your answers.
I don’t believe resetting solves anything, I frequently advice people not to reset
my current workload is about 200 reviews per day and I think it is still low, currently waiting for first burning reviews, which should increase it to about 220 on average
I would never stop adding lessons, consistency is very important to me and I would rather slow down, I consider 5 lessons per day to be bare minimum, even if I have to do them 5 minutes before midnight
if the reviews pile up, I will just do them all, I am OK with doing 500 reviews in one go
But I understand that this approach is not for everyone, so you choose your own rules.
Nice. I’m just yanking your chain, but burnout is real and WK creep can take over time you could be using towards other parts of the language. You do you, and everyone’s got their methods. As you were my friend.
My usual approach is to jump directly to quiz, and see how many words I can get right just because they have an obvious meaning/reading combination, and then read the mnemonics of whatever I get wrong. I essentially never look at the example sentences in WK.
(My general philosophy is “it’s good enough if I have a general idea of what a word means, I’ll pick up the nuances from immersion”, which is the main reason I don’t feel the need to look at the example sentences)
Personally, I’ve started using the context sentences more over the last 10 levels or so. I used to take maybe 5 minutes for 5 lessons, but I found it difficult to remember any slightly different readings\meanings from the Kanji. Now I spend maybe 10 to 15 minutes per 5, which is a bigger time commitment, but reading and rereading every context sentence is very useful for me. I have the time available to spend 45 mins to an hour every day doing 20 lessons though, so maybe not worth it if you’re more pressed. My two cents
Thank you! I love it when the readings and meanings are almost an exact match with the kanji too. I may not bring myself to skipping the sentences altogether (not until I run out time to study all the N3 kanji before the JLPT in the summer at least), but I’ll attempt at finishing my daily lessons in an hour and first thing in the morning.
Thank you! These answers have been extremely helpful. I was mostly skipping the context sentences when I first started WK. Now that I reset it, I started to focus and spend too much time on them. I will try to finish 20 lessons in an hour in the mornings.
I love it when the readings and meanings are almost an exact match with the kanji too. I may not bring myself to skipping the sentences altogether (not until I run out time to study all the N3 kanji before the JLPT in the summer at least), but I’ll attempt at finishing my daily lessons in an hour and first thing in the morning.