TL;DR WaniKani reviews are making me miserable and I need to pause the reviews so I can catch up with them before continuing. Is there a feature or userscript that works like vacation mode except that it lets me continue to review the items available at time of pausing?
Ok, I’m not sure if this is where I should post this. I’m on level 19 and I am having a HUGE problem that I’m sure many other people have had. I have hundreds of reviews to do which accumulated over about four days that I wasn’t able to spend the good ole’ 3-4 hours a night on WaniKani. Most reviews pop up at the time that I would be practicing, like tomorrow night between midnight and 2am I am going to be assaulted with well over 100 new reviews. Also ,when I start a new level and do the lessons it takes days and days before I can even do the first reviews of these items because I get too busy fending off the unrelenting onslaught of earlier review items. I am buried so far beneath reviews that I haven’t been able to study virtually any grammar despite having bought Genki (full price) months ago. I also can’t work through 500+ reviews while working 10-12 hour shifts on weekends, nor can I while going back to school for math. I genuinely enjoy learning the kanji and it’s one of the only things I have in life that gives me a glimmer of satisfaction but this is wearing me down and I;m afraid of burning out.
Maybe it’s how I go about it in that I’m not just typing the first thing I think a Kanji/Vocab item means and moving on, I like to spend a few seconds trying to remember the radicals and the mnemonics for items that don’t immediately come to mind.
I literally just found out about vacation mode while writing this. I am going to use it like crazy, like literally turning it on when I am not actively studying until I can get through this. The problem with this is the aforementioned 100+ dumps that will still land on me while practicing. I also read that there is a one week limit on vacation mode? How’s that work? Like, can I only have it on for a week at a time? Or is it some BS where I can only use it for a week throughout the year?
I am desperate for anything that will allow me to pause the new reviews from coming in while I finish the ones I already have stockpiled. I feel like the Jeff Bezos of WaniKani reviews right now.
edit: I’m sure that after just working through what I can each night that I will eventually work them down but I have no idea how long that might take. I don’t want to wait weeks and weeks before moving on to following levels.
I heard about a new reorder script that sounds like it does almost exactly what you want. I’ll try to find the name of it in a moment.
I believe this script does what you want
As for this…
I’ve done that a lot of times by doing just a bit more than the forecasted incoming reviews. You do have to adjust for missed reviews, but it does help them whittle down gradual. Like say you have 50 reviews coming tomorrow. Do 55-60 reviews. Double check the incoming number (maybe now it says 70) and then do the difference plus 5-10 more reviews. It definitely takes time though.
Can I also ask what your goal is with studying Japanese? In most cases grammar is more helpful than kanji. Also it sounds like you might be doing what I used to do- use WK as a crutch. Because it feels like you’re making progress by studying kanji because srs is simple and easy to do. However though, when it comes to learning Japanese, there are better and more worthwhile ways to practice, even if they don’t have that same easy effect of seeing reviews go down. Things like reading or practicing speaking, all depending on your goal. 3-4 hours of kanji nightly isn’t going to take you as far as trying to do something like read something at an appropriate level or talking with a native speaker. Just dropping that since I had the same problem and now that I’m focusing on grammar, production, and reading, I’m seeing my Japanese improve a lot more than before. Been there, done that. I hope you avoid burnout and get some good sleep.
It basically shoves your older reviews to the back of the queue so for example if you have 1000 items you can lock 900 and just work on the newest 100 as they come due. Then when you feel like you can handle more, you move the lock down to 850 or 800 and so on.
EDIT: Hah, @Dio-Berry found it while I was still typing! There you go, two recommendations for that script.
No one has mentioned this but you can control how many reviews you get by limiting how many lessons you do.
By the sounds of it, you are doing every lesson as soon as it arrives and this is why you’re getting reviews in huge chunks and why you have so many of them.
It’s pretty common practise to limit how many lessons you do. Some people do it based on the number of apprentice/guru items you have, others just do a set number of lessons per day. And you can obviously hybrid it too.
For the time being, stop doing all lessons and work on getting your review queue under control. (plenty of advice in here already for that) then look at getting a comfortable lesson plan underway.
Either you have a ton of leeches, or your lesson process isn’t working for you. I’d suggest you take a month or two off from lessons and do nothing but your reviews. Only do reviews until you reach a point where you feel that you’re not seeing enough items each day.
It sounds like you’re actively trying to work against the SRS system. By pausing or using vacation mode, you’re going to push reviews you need to see further back, which means you will likely forget more of them, get them wrong, and they will become apprentice again, raising your daily review count rather than lowering it like you’re trying to do.
Perhaps you can consider resetting back a few levels as well if the content is too overwhelming, and going at a slower pace.
Leeches as in reviews that keep coming up because I get them wrong? If so, that’s definitely part of the problem. I haven’t used Vacation Mode yet. My thought was to just use it over the next few days when I’m not actively studying to try to limit the lessons that are coming in. With the thought of using VM or pausing the worry of that came to me. But if I have 600 reviews and the ones on a shorter interval are held off until the last 50 reviews or so then I figure I’m no worse off, ya know? I’m realizing while reading through different threads here that trying to do Lessons as soon as they’re available isn’t really helping me. Another thing that could be a problem is trying to rush through them, getting them wrong, then justifying it to myself as ‘if I get it wrong then I just have to keep reviewing until I know it without thinking’. I usually have all my lessons and reviews cleared but this situation pops up every so often where I get overwhelmed with the sheer number and they keep coming.
Yes. I have been doing lessons basically as soon as I can. I’m realizing that that’s not as helpful as I had thought back in level 3 when it made sense. Even when there have been 80+ reviews I would do them all and tell myself, knowing I likely wouldn’t remember them all, that it would be good practice to keep reviewing them. I think the problem has been the obsessive urge to ‘collect’ kanji the same way I ‘collect’ books I know I’ll never get around to reading. Obviously that was a huge blunder and I need to rethink how I carry on from here.
Someone wiser will hopefully chirp in here but there’s probably an argument for resetting a couple of levels. But please don’t do it blindly on my advice, I’ve never reset myself so I could be leading you astray.
I might try the script, but, after reading through some other replies I think I’m going to slow down on lessons to give myself some breathing room and try to better manage my reviews. I agree that WK has become a crutch. I want to learn grammar, speak, read, etc. I had made the assumption when seeing people talk about learning these things all while doing WK that everyone else was just better at this than me, that they could do all these reviews and still have time to study other things, and that I’d eventually work myself to that point too. Like, when I bought Genki (and a bunch of other resource books) I thought that I’d be able to utilize them while keeping up with WK the way I was going. As obvious as it is now that people have pointed it out, I never considered just not doing lessons as soon as they appeared because that was what I thought everyone else was able to do.
for managing review piles which are larger than what you can do in a day, i find a reorder script to be very useful. it allows you to do urgent (apprentice-level) reviews on time, while delaying less urgent (guru and higher) reviews.
Please don’t be too hard on yourself! With the advertising that you can finish the program in a year and many users insisting that reviews should be cleared every day, I think it’s a natural conclusion to come to and you don’t get much other insight unless you read a lot of guides or make/read threads like this one.
It took me years to realize that the limited utility of WK and just how much I was using it as a crutch. I hope that you can get things rebalanced and get to the place you want to be with your Japanese studies
+1 to this, I think it’s a bit more theoretically sound than using vacation mode. When I have too many reviews to clear in one day, I try to aim for doing a certain target number of reviews every day until the queue is cleared again. During these times, I reorder my reviews to make sure that I still hit all my apprentice and some Guru I reviews. (Then I turn off randomization for the rest of the session because I’m worried about losing the benefits of ‘interleaving’, idk if that’s really necessary though)
For people who are really swamped, I’ve seen them reorder reviews by ascending level order, which is kind of like ‘resetting a few levels’ but less harsh. Seems like a good idea. I guess the lock script mentioned above is also doing a similar thing?
