The three rules in the onboarding guide

Before noon? Who gets up before half past lunch?!

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It’s 08:24 here in Texas and I’ve been up for around 4 hours…

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Perhaps, but the Knowledge Guide gives advice for a multi-year (or at least yearlong) journey. Of the the nine hundred or so days I’ve been here, precisely one had no items scheduled for review.

It seems reasonable to provide slightly different or additional advice in an email to those who’ve not yet taken their first step.

The very next parenthetical sentence states that these are in priority rather than sequential order. It wouldn’t hurt for the email to also state that you need to do some lessons before you have any reviews, but I don’t think the Knowledge Guide should emphasize day one above all the others.

Fwiw, my highest rated comment was about pedagogy. It discusses experts often making poor teachers because they focus too much on correctness and corner-cases rather than actual teaching.

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I think this is a little too vague. New users won’t know how the amount correlates to being overwhelmed, and the first few levels are not a good measure.
While you do explain things in detail further down, as you said, people might not even read that far.

I think a better general rule would be

  1. Do lessons regularly, but in small batches.
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  1. and most importantly, DON’T BLINK

I do agree that stressing reviews over lessons is more important. This is a chicken and the egg situation, for a new user who is completely clueless if 1. is “do your reviews” they may think, huh? what reviews? I don’t have any? that’s because they need to do the lessons first.

Maybe they should just get rid of the numbers, as numbering 1, 2, and 3 instead of using bullet points as you said gives an order of importance.

I like the additional page idea, especially the workload and no shame in wrong answers. For a long time I felt much shame for wrong answers.

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It’s difficult for me to give an actual opinion, as even Kanji-wise, as I do more than WaniKani’s quizzing system. So, I’ll throw in my two cents here.

  • “Do your reviews first” is easily the most accurate thing. However, on the best amount of reviews (without overwhelming yourself), I would say - it is decided by 1. accuracy 2. time taken
    • Time taken depends, as I can tolerate over an hour of reviews in the past; but 30 minutes would be reasonable.
  • If your accuracy falls, it is best to reduce number of reviews. Don’t force yourself to do more reviews despite failing.
    • “Providing too many incorrect answers” may conflict with “No shame in wrong answers”. Actually, you should have shame, and learn well, that is, the failing or leeches are also counted as your still-count-as-lessons.
    • It can also be said, be aware of what are your Apprentice pile. Be proactive before they become leeches.
  • Be strict. When in doubt, mark as wrong.
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Tbh I think this seems a bit pedantic. Doing your lessons is only number one because you can’t have reviews without them. I think your point can just be fixed by replacing “them” in number 3 with “your reviews.”

It’s a fair cop. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been accused of this. :nerd_face:

That’s a reasonable opinion, but I disagree. I’ve seen many posts on the forums of people continuing to do all their lessons as soon as they become available, even after they begin to struggle. (“I want to go faster” is also a common common, but it’s not because they aren’t doing lessons!)

As I mentioned in the first point, this is a subtle point, but I believe many are mislead from the beginning into thinking they should always do their lessons first, and as the highest priority, then never consider the point again. Your suggested change would be unlikely affect such user’s behavior. Would they start to do reviews first or prioritize them over lessons?

I’ve trained a lot of people on a lot of things for many years. I know the power of documenting short, simple, memorable rules, especially on the first page of training material. (The Spiderman admonition comes to mind.)

Every word matters, and so does the ordering. One rule is better than two rules is better than three. We really have just two unique rules, but if we were to reduce the rules to just one, would it be “DO YOUR REVIEWS” or “DO YOUR LESSONS”?

As I tried to explain above, I don’t buy this argument at all.

Firstly, brand new users may not know what lessons or reviews even are.

Secondly, the UI clearly shows when you have no reviews available and it’s not like they can do anything wrong. Even brand new users will be familiar with common web UI idioms: it’s immediately obvious that the reviews button is disabled and that there are 0 available (only the lessons button is selectable). At worst they’ll ask themselves why they don’t have any reviews available, which might even prompt them to read more of the documentation.

Finally, documentation must balance new users vs. intermediate/advanced users. On the one hand, there will (hopefully) always be far more new users. It makes sense to prioritize them. On the other hand, intermediate/advanced users are FAR more likely to eventually read beyond the first paragraph or two.

I’d be willing to bet pretty good money that many users never get read further than the three rules. That’s why I think it’s important to make “DO YOUR REVIEWS” rule #1, and, less importantly, add a page that explains lessons and reviews in more detail (for users who do read further, but mostly to give advanced users something to link to when responding to new user’s questions on the the forum!).

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I guess I’m an exceptionally stupid user then :face_holding_back_tears: lool

I do see your point though, I think users should get into the community aspect of things ASAP too tbh, having people with the same goal to chat to has made me stick around and try to get more serious.

Oh, heavens no! I’ve enjoyed all your posts and appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

I truly welcome the pushback, even I recognize I’m not always right! :laughing:

I do agree that the possibility of confusing a small number of day-1 users exists, but, to me, the cost of telling everyone to prioritize lessons far outweighs that confusion. I also think the confusion can be mitigated with the introductory email, for example.

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I think the importance of lessons is explained with the explanation of what an SRS system is, but I think you’re right, a lot of people won’t even read those bits, people just want to get into it and use it and work it out.

They could even go as far as for the first few days reminding users over and over to do their reviews. They do send emails out quite frequently, to be fair :smiley: .

I agree with this. It’s what I was trying to explain in the bit about controlling your workload:

But this still argues for de-prioritizing lessons! If you’re accuracy is falling, it’s unwise to continue doing lessons.

Here’s the thing to consider though, are these people who complain just a vocal minority? I think it may be possible that most are able to follow through with wanikani as is, even without having thoroughly read the onboarding guide. If they have trouble, they can always just post their concerns on the forums here and we can offer suggestions.

I noticed you complaining about a certain user here who had trouble leveling up, neglecting their reviews, and then ulitmately feeling bold enough to offer advice, despite still being at a low level. I don’t think most people complaining about wanikani are that . . . self-centered.

I think the free levels are the best way one learns how to use wanikani. You can only hold someone’s hand so much through the language learning process.

Perhaps another small guide should be written when one makes it to maybe the painful levels, to explain how to handle the increasing workload, perhaps even starting at a lower level than painful? It doesn’t help that wanikani is marketed as “learn 2000 kanji in a year” either.

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I’m requesting two things:

  1. Reordering the rules, making “Do your reviews” rule number one.

  2. Adding another page to the onboarding series explaining lessons and reviews in more detail.

I’m honestly a little surprised that either is at all contentious. Which are are you arguing against?

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I’m pretty much in favor of this as written, good work.

That’s very hard to authoritatively refute or support, but we do know the dropoff rate for Wanikani is very high. There are a lot of possible reasons one might quit, though we could imagine among them there are some people who get burnt out from creating bad situations that this guide seeks to hopefully avoid in the first place. Someone coming to the forums to ask for help has already gotten into a situation bad enough that they’ve recognized it and they now have to fight their way back from it, y’know?

Very true, but all of this is about the somewhat unintuitive way SRS and the Wanikani system in general works for people new to it, not language learning.

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The forums only account for a fraction of all WK users, so everything to do with them will be in the minority, but I think the overall trends still hold for the WK user base as a whole.

I think that’s just an illustrative example. I’ve been on here since 2019 and the most common problem I see by far are people who get overwhelmed with reviews. I even have a copy/paste set of suggestions saved since it comes up so often.

While missing days is a pretty common cause, the main one is almost always doing all the lessons as soon as they come up and then being unable to keep up with the daily review load as the levels progress.

Aye, good point.

I would agree that the marketing paints a very optimistic view of what is possible. There are many examples of people who have completed WK in close to the absolute fastest time so it’s not false, but it’s definitely trying to sell the ideal rather than the reality.

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I’m not against your idea of prioritizing reviews. I honestly don’t have much else to add. You all made good points. Maybe wanikani can hold a survey to guage how people feel about the srs, as only a minority come to the forums after all.

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The point is, I don’t exactly agree with small batches; other than it is safe. (also, it isn’t well defined) I tried to contemplate how large a batch size is calculated - what is the best batch size.

I might be wrong, but I don’t think people finish WaniKani or their Kanji studies in 10 years, although 5 years or less may be possible.

I get what you are saying, but number one cannot fundamentally be possible, because when you start wanikani you have no reviews, and this screen is designed for people to read the moment they sign up.

By your level you have been around for a while (and well done!) so you may not remember what it was like on the day you joined. For me who started only two months ago, I remember very well creating an account, then looking at the screen and thinking, ‘What now?’ Ok I’ll read this thing. Do the lessons, do the reviews, wait, do more. Ok then.

Your number two point though on making another screen I think is good. There should be a new page or section for ‘What next’ for after you pass level 3. Doing all your lessons the moment they arrive works perfectly well for the first three levels.

For people that get to level 4 and commit to the program, a new page stressing reviews first, then lessons as you can handle them, would be good. I don’t disagree with you that there are plenty of people who don’t get this, get overwhelmed and complain, but I don’t think editing the order of instructions on the first place is the place to address it.

I think keeping the onboarding pages as they are, in fine.

If I was in a meeting and we were discussing the problem, ‘when people join we tell them to do their lessons first, but this starts to be the wrong method after a while and they don’t realise this on their own’.

My suggestion would be, to add a new section in the knowledge guide after ‘Getting Started’ called ‘Continuing Your Journey’ or something, where they write all the stuff you are suggesting. I would put a link to this section in the Welcome to the full version of WaniKani! email so people that join for level 4 onwards will (maybe) read it then. That’s how I would do it.

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to be fair to wanikani, isn’t that most marketing though? Most just put “user results may vary”…

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