Wanikani + Bunpro Daily review?

I started Wanikani and Bunpro a few days ago, and looking at some forum on it seem like the consensus of how to review is at morning → afternoon → evening, I look back and I only did one for each around evening, does that going to affect on my study process with the SRS?

Welcome to the forums!

I’m doing the same combination, although I started with Bunpro (Genki path grammar+vocab) after I got to level 5 here.
What I found works best for me is:

  1. lessons in the morning
  2. a. self-study quiz for those lessons a couple of times here on WK: 5-10m after the lessons, again 1h later, again 2h later
  3. b. manual review of BP lessons (annoying they don’t have a self-study option) at least once
  4. first ‘official’ review 4h after lessons in both WK and BP
  5. second ‘official’ review in the evening (8h after first review, 12h after lessons)

I added 2. because I had difficulties with retention between the lessons and the first review, which would further impact all progression.

Now, that’s just how my brain works and you may not need such an intensive schedule. Recently I took one day off (no lessons, no reviews) and that had a pretty big impact on my overall accuracy in the following days :frowning:

However I do believe they came up with these SRS stages 0->4->8 etc based on studies on larger groups and it’s what works best for most people…

On the other hand, if you have very good accuracy with just one evening review then… all the better :+1:
Any time you save from not doing SRS could be better spent on immersion or additional (targeted) language study.

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The WK intervals start at 4 hours then 8 hours, before getting into units of a day or more. So if you’re only doing one review session a day then:

  • items the system thinks you should see again in four or eight hours will actually only get to you after 24 hours, so you’re more likely to have forgotten them
  • it will take you three days to get an item into Apprentice 4 rather than two days (and this then compounds so that overall you progress through the course at a slower pace)

Some people like to “speedrun” the system as fast as possible, which requires three review sessions a day at carefully spaced intervals. That’s definitely not necessary or a good idea for everybody, but I suspect that in general two shorter review sessions a day will be better than one big one. There was another thread where somebody did the maths, and most of the slowdown in pace through the course due to doing one review batch a day goes away if you switch to two. Plus the worst case for delay of review goes from “should have been 4 hours, was 24” to “should have been 4 hours, was 12”.

So my suggestion is that if your schedule allows, try two review sessions a day and see how that goes. Personally I find my (non-WK) SRS reviews pretty exhausting in large quantities, so being able to do them as multiple smaller amounts is less demotivating than trying to plough through 100+ all in a single session.

I saw a comment ages ago when I first started reading the forums, a lvl 60 user said they didn’t even bother with lessons unless they KNEW they’d be able to hit that 4hr review, cos otherwise they’d have been very likely to forget.

I think I’m kinda the same, so I do lessons at 8am ready to review them around lunchtime. Then again at like 9pm while just chilling or whatever. This schedule basically goes out the window on weekends/holidays but it seems good in terms of SRS, after the lesson and 2 reviews it’s easier to remember that item even if you miss the next day or whatever.

With radicals/kanji I’d echo pm215, 8hrs vs 24hrs is gonna slow you down a fair bit, maybe try and prioritise those reviews to level up faster? Whatever works for you.

Hope that is kinda helpful, maybe not, but welcome to the forums and WK anyway! No matter your schedule you’re sure to learn a ton!

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I don’t like too many reviews at the same time - I prefer to spread them as much as possible. I do 10 lessons every morning from each (1 grammar, 9 vocab from Bunpro) and then do reviews every hour or as often as I can. To me that’s more manageable.

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I’d like to do that consistently too and maybe even have three review sessions per day, but I haven’t (yet?) found a way to split out the reviews based on items’ current SRS level.

Ideally I’d be able to choose doing reviews for Apprentice and Guru in the evenings but push out Master/Enlightened (and their BP equivalents) to the next day morning or mid-day.
I would not want to delay my Apprentice/early Guru past their due times (at least not by more than a couple of hours or so) because it would impact accuracy when pushed too far out…

Without getting too into it, yeah. Just doing them all at once in the evening is going to be slower than doing them three times a day. People do the morning → noon → evening thing because it’s easiest to line it up in such a way that you can do the reviews for new words as soon as they’re available.
You do the lessons, and then you do reviews for those lessons 4 hours later. Then they’ll be up for review again 8 hours after that review session.
Because of this, a lot of people will do their lessons/reviews something like this:

  • 8am: Reviews + new lessons for the day
  • 12pm: Reviews
  • 8pm: Reviews

It’s those 4 and 8 hour intervals that are important for speed. You can do whatever reviews pop up in between those intervals, but in order to go max speed, you have to hit those times.
It’s important to guage whether or not this pace is good for you, because it is a lot of work. Remember, at the end of the day, the goal here isn’t to level up faster, it’s to learn kanji. Don’t get burnt out over speed.

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Thank for all the comments on here, now I can change the way I do lessons and review :smile:.

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