You get around 100 items per level, your apprentice count basically means that you are working on two or three full levels worth of content in parallel, and these levels are filled with hard to remember content only …
If the apprentice count is really high for a longer period of time it means that items float around for weeks but you never mastered them, if it is just temporary you can power through (but remember that there will be large peaks in the future when the items come up again in weeks and months )
I think vacation mode completely defeats the point of SRS. If you don’t do reviews for many days and end up with thousands to do it means that’s how many you need to do. I don’t see why it should be disheartening, you can just do as many as you can/want and over time the backlog will be absorbed. No point in pretending the iatus didn’t happen and go on with making new lessons if there are tons of reviews to do, unless vacation mode magically stops your brain from forgetting things.
I’m curious how this will impact my leveling speed. They vast majority of those reviews are vocabulary, which in general I’m not really worried about. I’d have to stop doing new lessons to get that number down, which I think would slow down my leveling (unless maybe I used the reorder script? I just do vanilla WK and always try to keep lessons and reviews at 0).
On a side note I’m home from my day away from the computer, with 198 reviews due and 46 in the next hour. Should have used vacation mode! Hahaha
If you are actually going to have a vacation, then vacation mode is great.
If you want to be spending your vacation doing reviews, then you can do that, in which case you’re not really having a vacation.
I don’t know what your situation is, but in the end your leveling speed is determined by the rate items leave the set of items you have to review frequently. If you add more items than you master, you will spend more and more time reviewing the higher you level up.
Why are you not worried about the vocab? Do you think you will master it eventually, or because you don’t want to learn the vocab yet (or at all)? You could use reordering on the lessons (radicals and kanji first) and have a huge lesson queue filled with vocab, but I think the vocab is essential to learn more readings, repeat the kanji in a different context, (and if you want to understand Japanese “kanji only” won’t help you much).
Well, leveling is determined specifically by getting radicals and Kanji to guru. You could hypothetically fail every vocab every time and still level up. Most of my 300 in the apprentice queue are vocab. Since I’m two days removed from a new level, a good chunk (I’d guess 1/3) is from my new level as well(radicals, Kanji, vocab). There’s a handful of old radicals and Kanji that fell back down from guru level after I didn’t see it for a while, and a whole bunch of old vocab that gives me trouble (like rendaku stuff, or nin/jin words comes to mind).
Anyway, I level up at roughly a ten day per level clip most levels with the large apprentice queue, so if I stop to clear that out or lower it, I won’t finish my level for a long time because I won’t pick up the second set of the Kanji and radicals in the level I need to complete it.
What I’m curious about is, would having fewer daily reviews help me to retain the new Kanji and radicals better? I’m not sure that they would, but not picking up new lessons would prevent leveling because I couldn’t complete the requirements for the level.
As far as learning the actual language, I take college classes so for now that’s the vocab and grammar I’m really concerned about. They dole out Kanji at a painfully slow level, so WK is great for that, and it also helps with extracurricular activity that I do. It’s just easier to look up Kanji words I encounter if I know at least one On’yomi reading, even if I don’t know the rest of the Kanji in the compound.
Anyway, this is getting long winded, but I think it’s worth trying to get that apprentice queue down before picking up new lessons as an experiment at least. I figure three years from now no matter what I’ll hit level 60 which is way faster than any other method I know of so fretting a little about an extra week isn’t really worth it.
I tend to be away from connectivity for a couple months at a time due to work, and I think those are cases where vacation mode is helpful. I can ease my way back in with the last few things I was learning before the tidal wave comes rushing in.
Eh, I plan not to use vacation mode when I go to America for 2 weeks in the summer. It only takes like 10 minutes to do 100 reviews. So, not a huge impact on anything.
I had to stop to have more time for my grad studies and final papers especially. When I start learning Greek in the Fall, I’ll be going back on Vacation Mode again… I’m not sure for how long.
I can’t do 100 reviews in 10 minutes, but I think that if 10 minutes in a day is all you can do it’s still better than no reviews for 2 weeks. An if you really can’t, it’s still better not to use vacation mode and just do reviews when you are back. The number of reviews will be big, but at least it will be a correct estimation of what’s to be reviewed. No point in trying to fool ourselves pretending that just because we were on vacation we stopped forgetting stuff.
I went on vacation travelling around Japan for five weeks. For the last two weeks, I turned on vacation mode. I was getting plenty of revision done by reading Japanese every day. I have no regrets from using vacation mode and personally I think it’s a great option.
I abuse the hell out of vacation mode…the only thing that keeps me from quitting. I actually did stop for a while and realized vacation mode existed and only started again because of it. My depression/anxiety has been bad lately and everything just got overwhelming. Right now I’m only doing like 30 reviews a day…takes me about a half hour. I’m having a lot of trouble focusing but I don’t want to give up completely. I’ve finally lowered the number to under 300 with vacation mode and also dropped back a level to help a little more.
For a lot of us this is just a hobby and we still have other responsibilities. Having a huge amount of reviews can be so demotivating that you fall off the wagon entirely and that’s why, in case of doubt, I‘m very much pro vacation mode.
If there was something that you should have reviewed earlier and you forgot it in the meantime then you will get it wrong in your next review anyway so there is no harm in using it, imo. Timespans without reviews will obviously hurt your progress a little bit either way. I‘d rather come back from it in a way that makes me feel confident and relaxed rather than „omg I will never be able to dig myself out of this hole“.
I don’t care about some missed reviews when looking at the big picture. The only thing that really counts is getting back on the horse after a break and vacation mode makes that more likely.
First off, Vacation Mood does every user a disservice to our learning. And is only available so Wanikani can profit.
Secondly, not doing reviews for longer than a week or two puts a lot of your previous hard work in the toilet.
Take away: DON’T LET REVIEW PILE UP for longer than a week or two.
If you have not bought Wanikani out right; that is, you are paying periodically to use the service than Vacation mood is just a means for Wanikani to cash in. It is a fallacy to think that the “length on Vacation Mood” = the “length added to completion”. The length towards completion will ALWAYS be considerably longer and thus makes it a money trap and huge time waster.
If a break is needed than take this course of action: stop doing lessons but continue to do reviews
To be frank, you aren’t valuing your time than. Wanikani is not designed for the wavering heart but is meant to be completed, from start to finish, all in one go.
My belief: our hobbies should have some means to an end rather than just actions that fill voids of time. Need I say, life is short.
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