Start doing lessons in smaller batches to space out the reviews (10-20) a day and do your reviews at consistent times.
For example, if you do a small batch of lessons and reviews at 8:00, then reviews again at 12:00 and 20:00 eventually all of your reviews will be due at those times and you won’t have to waste time staring at the screen waiting for your next review session. Spend that time studying grammar/reading/listening/shadowing/sentence-mining/whatever you want…
WaniKani can’t be rushed, just make it part of your daily routine.
So wait, I can get get all the vocab 100% wrong all the time and still advance all the way to level 60 as long as I master the radicals and the isolated kanji? Not that I would want to, but I had been operating under the assumption that all items mattered equally.
Not to be repetitive, but to indicate how busy you’re going to get; items from lower levels will start returning at some point, and that workload is absolutely overwhelming sometimes. I had to take a break from lessons twice to get everything to calm down, and had about 300-400 reviews spread throughout the day. If the speed of lessons were to increase, more people would start to burnout I think. It’s a delicate balance.
For what matters I like your idea, and I am not surprised by the general reaction. It’s the same anytime anyone propose something new. Anything. ‘You are using it wrong’, ‘it’s perfect as is’ etc. Just send them an email and safe yourself the frustration of having to read the opinion of the community
People just usually avoid suggestions that might allow cheating the system and hurting the users (even if it benefits the faster users). It’s completely fair.
The Feedback forum’s pinned post, created by WaniKani staff, says not to make posts about the site being slow. I assume they aren’t requesting emails about slowness either.
I don’t see how an algorithm that spaces review in a more sensible way could hurt the user, on the contrary it would benefit most users as the uneven load frustrate many users and I suspect it’s the main reason so many fail to ever finish Wanikani. Wanikani considers all items the same (as in the SRS algorithm fails to identify what’s easy or not for a given user). This does not benefit the user at all, as at the beginning whoever has any familiarity with Japanese will be frustrated by how slow it is as he knows already everything, and towards the middle-end most people will be overwhelmed.
This is not the user’s fault, but the system fault, and the huge number of topics on this very problem are proof. Any half decent SRS has a more advanced algorithm that will differentiate the spacing for different items. For example Anki has the “ease” that changes individually for each item and becomes bigger or smaller depending on how many times the user fails the item. Another thing that would improbe the algorithm is some noise that will change the spacing ever so slightly so items that were studied and reviewed correctly together won’t show together after 1 or more months (otherwise one can remember one thanks to the other but fail to recognise them in the wild because they don’t actually show up together in real life).
Wanikani is a good system overall, but there are definitely some shortcomings (like the above mentioned algorithm), but the most annoying of all is not wanikani’s fault: it’s the small but loud minority that jumps at anyone proposing any improvement.
Of course it is. The problem is that in most (*SOME) cases I don’t see any discussion, but just mockery or off topic comments. And I am clearly not referring to you, you can clearly see what I mean if you read the discussion start to end.
Maybe. I definitely saw more than one, but of course it’s down to personal interpretation about what’s off topic. To make this very comment less off-topic I add another feature present in other SRS that I think would benefit wanikani and partially address what the OP is looking for. Although some items are due let’s say in one hour one should be able to review them a bit earlier. For example if an item that was scheduled to be reviewed at 1am is reviewed at 12 it won’t hurt the SRS but it will save the user to have to wait until the next morning or lose some sleep. The maximum time bias should be a percentage of the total length of the wait so it wouldn’t hurt the SRS, and generally we are speaking about one hour for very new items, a few hours for items that show up after several days and maybe one day or so for enlighten items or so (it might help with holidays without having to use vacation mode which I think actually hurts the user)
