I haven’t done any lessons for weeks. It’s hard to start reviews because there are so many. I have 1010 reviews in my queue at the time of this writing. I’ve tried taking the approach of slowly but surely getting them done, doing about 50 a day, but I’d wake up the next morning to 100 new reviews. What is a good approach I can take to get on top of reviews? Just powering through is exhausting, disheartening, and not very educational. Please help.
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Try enabling vacation mode when you go to bed, and then disabling it when you wake up. The Crabigator likes to sneak up on people when they’re sleeping.
Additionally, if you choose to take another weeks-long hiatus, enable vacation mode beforehand.
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Wouldn’t all the reviews come back in a few big waves in the future though?
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Weeks long hiatuses are not planned heh. I was still doing reviews for the start, just not lessons so I wouldn’t have even more reviews to go through.
I could try vacation mode at night, but I imagine that might delay the inevitable.
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Admittedly, I’ve never tested this, but I’m attentive enough to my reviews that I seldom get big waves (15+ in one hour). Vacation mode is supposed to push everything back equally, so if you keep doing reviews on a near-hourly basis in small amounts, then you shouldn’t be getting any “review bombs”.
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Even if you don’t plan a hiatus, it only takes a few seconds to enable vacation mode. As long as you’re working on your review pile little by little, “the inevitable” shouldn’t come.
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Alright yeah.
I think right now the problem is, I used to have the goal of keeping my WaniKani dashboard empty always when I had plenty of free time, and now that I have very little free time it’s coming back to bite me.
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How quickly do you go through new lessons?
Normally, as soon as they come up. No lesson waits longer than a day. As of recent, completely ignored. I’ll have to find a middle ground.
Understandable. I, on the other hand, only do 10-15 lessons per day. I usually don’t clear out my lessons until just before leveling up.
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That’s a smart approach. Something like that is what I imagine I’ll get into the habit of doing. My initial approach was based on impatience.
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My recommendation for tackling a large amount of reviews, as a person who in March/April had burnout and ended up not doing much for 6 weeks and returned to 900+ reviews:
Get a script or third party app that lets you order by Descending stage. So the highest (enlightened, master) first. Those are the ones you’re most likely to remember and get right, and even if you get them wrong they’ll still take a little while before they come back.
Thus lowering your pile to a nicer level to boost your morale before tackling on the Apprentice ones.
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That’s a good suggestion, thanks. That would make it feel more manageable.
There’s a vanilla feature that’s also similarly helpful, in the settings - sort by earliest level. The advantage is two-fold, not only are those more likely to be at the highest stage as Squintina said, and get cleared quicker, if you miss one, you will still see it at the correct intervals because it will still get priority. So it helps along the way to relearn anything forgotten and not have them get sucked randomly into the other 1000 reviews.
After you catch up - set it back to random
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vacation mode is a must before leaving for a while. Is it possible to put it in vacation mode and start chewing through your reviews bit by bit. Do something like 120 a day. Less or more, even something like 20 reviews a day will help you so long as you eventually get through it.
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I wouldn’t mess around with vacation mode. This is not how it is meant to be used. Just let the reviews pile up and ignore the numbers. As long as you do reviews and much less lessons, the stream of new reviews will eventually turn to just few reviews per day.
As someone who recently plowed through 2000+ reviews to get back to zero and gain a level, honestly you need to find time to do more than 50 reviews a day if it’s still important to you.
If you’re too busy or find other aspects of Japanese study to be more valuable at this stage, then that’s fine too. At your level, a quick daily glance at NHK News Web Easy might be more fruitful.
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@Squintina gives a lot of great advice, and I value their opinion, but in this case, I’d also give some thought to trying the opposite course - ordering reviews by Ascending SRS stage.
The whole basis of SRS is that new material needs to be reviewed frequently at first, and then less frequently as you master it. If you address all of your Enlightened reviews first, it might clear your queue a bit faster, but it might also leave Apprentice material languishing for additional weeks.
If you have Enlightened items in your review queue, it’s been 4 months since you’ve last seen those words, so if you don’t get to them for another couple of weeks, who cares? I often let my Enlightened reviews pile up, knowing I’ll get to them eventually. The numbers don’t bother me. But if I ignore Apprentice reviews, I quickly forget the material. Apprentice reviews should be cleared daily.
I’d recommend focusing on improving the quality of your reviews by timely addressing the Apprentice/Guru reviews first, and then picking at the Master/Enlightened material when you have extra time. Don’t let the total numbers worry you too much, as long as you can clear the material at the lower SRS levels. Improving the quality of your review sessions might serve you better in the long run, as it might reduce the total number of times you need to review each item.
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