First question, no that is not wise. Second question, you really don’t have to do that!!!
Firstly, vacation mode is really not a good way to manage review volume. You should take control of those numbers by lowering the number of lessons you do. That will decrease the review number /day.
Vacation mode means you’ll increase the amount of time between the SRS intervals, because it really just pauses all your pending reviews. And when you turn vacation mode off, the clock starts ticking again.
Especially in the early SRS-stages that means you’re making it much harder for you to give the correct answers, as those time intervals are pretty short. With vacation mode, you’ve just made them longer.
So, like I said, just decrease your number of lessons and you should get a more manageable number of reviews long-term. Short-term you might wanna stop doing lessons all-together, to quickly decrease the review amount.
And yeah, just do reviews in batches throughout the day. Some people have fixed numbers they do. But, what that number is, is really up to you, be it 20, 50 or 100 in a go.
Also, with the very-long interval ones, all that stopping and starting of the clock is going to turn a 4-month wait into a long, long time. You’ll never finish.
It’s the items guru and below that suffer more since a 1 week break, for example, increases the Apprentice intervals by up to 700% but the Guru 2 interval by only 50%.
For a real vacation, stop lessons 2 weeks before to clear out your apprentice queue before starting vacation mode.
However, doing that without vacation mode but just stopping lessons is also a good way to tackle a big review queue so the point stands.
Yes, for a single occurrence. But if you’re stopping the clock for (say, for the sake of numbers) 50% of every day, that’s going to happen a lot of times before the burn reviews come back around. 4 months becomes 8 months.
Don’t feel obligated to do them all in one go! I use wanikani during my deskwarming time at work, which is often interrupted by classes, marking, and whatever else. So often times I have to go back to it throughout the day in order to finish my review stack, which is a-okay imo!
I’ve developed something of a vacation mode habit since hitting level 30. Lately I can hardly go a few days without using it to delay my next batch of reviews. Hard to say if it’s a good or bad thing. I’m not sure if I’m using vacation mode so often because I’ve lost motivation, or if I’ve lost motivation because I know I have vacation mode to keep me from falling behind…
This is really not true though. No need for the scare tactics.
You only get as many reviews as you’ve done lessons to get. People who end up having 400+ reviews only get them by speeding along their lessons and/or neglecting to do reviews daily, letting them pile up.
If that happens, just don’t do lessons and take a week or two to gradually get rid of the pile.
Of course, having a very low accuracy during reviews can also be problematic.
Under a certain threashold, you’re basically not progressing most items up the SRS-levels, but pushing the items down (as they drop 2 levels when you fail them). You don’t need super-high accuracy, but it’s good to know that if you’re around 60%, that’s problematic.
But, if you’re just steadily doing lessons and reviews, you should never have super-high numbers of reviews to do.
Running the gauntlet at the speed that WaniKani allows can easily pop this type of rage into your review box.
Even during the middle levels this started happening… sometimes bro as you know, things just compile like some kind of super boss, even if your duking it out with the crabigator with 80%+ accuracy rate.
You’re not wrong about the reasons these things can happen for sure… but there are those days… those days of insanity.
@Ichigodolphin Know this rage eventually comes for all who venture this path… temper yourself if you wish to attain Kanji fluency young one, know that you will be fighting for your life many times during your battles with the crabigator.
Wow it’s my first post, this community is really alive isn’t it!
I stopped doing lessons a while ago as my previous approach was to smash all the lessons as soon as they come but we know how that goes.
I was feeling like I have to do all my reviews in one go, so if I don’t and the SRS will sort itself out, then I’ll just do that. I couldn’t understand how people can have a routine with wanikani so now it makes sense. Last summer I married a Japanese woman and adopted her daughter and intend to keep living in Japan for the foreseeable future, so I have a strong incentive to learn!
Really recommed doing 5 lessons a day. Maybe 10 if you are finding that too slow. But I find 5-10 is a perfect pace to progress through the new words but keeps the reviews manageable.
Congrats on your new family!! Best of luck with everything
Should be about right. There’s really no ‘set’ number of reviews per day, it depends on how fast you do the lessons and how many reviews you fail. You’d be a little above ‘steady state’ point there, so the number of reviews should go down little by little until you’d be doing them all every day.
If you did a steady 5 lessons per day and never failed any reviews, AND always did reviews when they were due, then eventually you would have a little less than 50 reviews per day to do. But in real life, it varies plus or minus a little from day to day.
Your main indicator of workload is going to be your apprentice count. Keeping that under a set number and only doing lessons when it’s under that number will smooth out the number of daily reviews you have.
For example, I kept apprentice under 100 and only did a max of 20 lessons per day when it was under that. That gave me a load of around 150-200 reviews per day, which was manageable for me.
