'treading water' mode

For one reason or another (had a baby :blush:) I’ve had to put Wanikani on vacation. I’m on level 9 and would normally get through 100+ reviews a day. Unfortunately this is just not possible and won’t be for some time.

What I’d really like would be a limited mode with 10 or 20 reviews per day so I can try to preserve what I’ve learnt but not get buried in reviews. It would help me feel like I was still getting somewhere.

What do people think?

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I think it’s a great idea. Right now there’s the “wrap up” button which lets you gracefully end a session. But it would be nice to be able to set the review size in advance.

I think one thing that WK is lacking is the ability to easy come back from a break where you sort of lost “half-learned” things. I made a suggestion of my own about this in an older thread: Sudden Death Reset

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This will kind of ruin the SRS Wanikani works with however. By the time you do your 10-20 reviews, they might already be forgotten.
I think a good way to implement this for now is to simply do 10-20 lessons every time, and only do new ones when you Guru+'ed those.
Alternatively, you could try to have about 30-40 apprentice items at a time and add lessons based on that, although that is harder than it seems, so I’d suggest the former option.

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That’s true, by doing a limited number of reviews you are abandoning proper spacing. If you could just selectively put items back into lessons (“sorry I took too much–take it back, please!”) you’d be able to have better control over things that are in SRS.

I think part of the struggle is not being able to balance the SRS spikes. Putting off reviews messes up the spacing. But there’s just something not quite right about not being able to plan a block of time well…

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Can’t you skip and not do the lessons? It’d quickly push your review numbers down by quite a lot after ~a week on it as items get promoted out of Apprentice (especially at level 9). That way, you’ll keep learning the lessons you’ve done but won’t get burdened with high rate of reviews (usually a problem at apprentice level, as the reviews hit you frequently).

Also, at higher SRS level (Guru+), missing the SRS interval isn’t that big of a deal.

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Hey Norbosan :slight_smile:

A similar thing happens to me when I stop doing reviews during a stressful semester and try to get back in again afterwards :sweat_smile:

What I now do is use a reordering skript and focus on the lower levels, so I at least get those items through to burn and learn them. I always do reviews from the smallest level onward (so for these words SRS is mostly in place) and set a goal matching to how much time I have (“do everything until level X today, because that is ca. 30 items”). If I reach a point where there are very little reviews until level X, I go on to level X+1 :smiley:

Yes, this means relearning a lot of things from the newer levels eventually, but for me this feels better than trying to keep remembering aaaall those words at once :sweat_smile: (I am mostly at 500+ open revews in total :see_no_evil:)

tl;dr :innocent: Maybe focusing on the earlier levels can help you get back into reviews while keeping SRS power :v:t3:
Also congratulations on your baby :hugs::relaxed:

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As mentioned above, you want to focus most on low SRS level items, as those are the one you are most likely to forget in the short term.
So I would use a userscript to order reviews by ascending SRS level (most urgent first) and use the wrap up button when you are about done.

Here’s a script I found on the forum. I do not know if it is still working.

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It should. And if it doesn’t, lemme know.

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Thank you everyone for your replies. I must confess I don’t completely understand how SRS works, I just work the lesson/review coal face with a sort of grim determination :grin:. I was thinking I could set up a burner account and splash about in the first three levels again for a while. That would be something.

I will look into the scripts and lesson avoiding strategies though. They all sound like promising options. I really don’t want to have to stop dead in my tracks. I’ve gone too far to turn back now!

@lacinoire Thank you! :blush: Also, her name (Tabitha) sounds awesome in Japanese ‘タビさん’

@Naphthalene Thanks, I’ll let you know if I get stuck. :blush:

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btw, I’ve also got another script that might be helpful here.
It extends the ‘wrap-up’ button so you can enter how much reviews you want to do.

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赤ちゃんのご誕生おめでとう!

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I read this as “for one reason or another I had a baby”, and all I could think of is “well, if you don’t know where babies come from, I’m not sure I could explain it”.

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@plantron I can read the first bit!! :blush: どうもありがとうございました

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It turns out there is more than one way to have them :grin: But that’s a long story.

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I suggest seeing if you can foist the baby on someone for a half hour twice a week and then clearing your reviews queue during the time your review level stabilises (could take anything between one week and a month). Don’t do any new lessons until your apprentice items are at 15 or lower, and then don’t do any new lessons if the lesson will bring over the 15 apprentice items.

You can set the lesson batch size to 3 in the settings. You can do a single batch of lessons a day 2-4 times a week depending on your level once you feel ready to get back to them.

I’d also really recommend changing lesson order to the setting “ascending level then shuffled” in the settings. The danger of being very slow with lessons/reviews is that you would forget readings and meanings of kanji and radicals since you wouldn’t see them used in context. Ascending then shuffled shifts the focus slightly towards vocabulary, which you’re going to need much more than any speed leveller.

All that’s said, I’d try doing 10 reviews several times a day. At least twice, if you want to be able to get yourself to a lighter workload. Use the wrap up button as much as you can, and keep in mind that you can get back to half done, abruptly left reviews for someone like an hour or two (if you’re using the same device and browser). @viet should be able to tell you the exact time.

Good luck, and congrats on the baby! May the little kidling become an adult that you enjoy spending time with!

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Hmmm, okay, you’ve all talked me into it, vacation mode off! What an encouraging lot you all are :smile:
I guess I was partly scared off by the horror stories of people with thousands of accumulated reviews.
I will take all tips onboard and get my apprentice reviews under control (currently 65).

@konekush Half an hour twice a week!? (Nah, that’s totally fine, I could do that and more :grin:) Thank you also for your kind words. I hope she likes Japan…

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Good luck! You can do it!!

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