Why you should not

“If you don’t snooze you loose”.

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I did art program in uni, but we were next to the architecture building so I can confirm that definitely sets up bad sleeping/eating habits for those students lol. they even added sleeping areas and a shower to that building while i was attending the uni, to help architecture majors.

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Classic Japanese overworking stories, I see.

You can almost think of the human brain as a CPU. If you overvolt it and run it at high temperatures over long periods of time it slowly deteriorates, and stuff like the thermal paste stops working properly (this is also why people recommend not keeping your computer turned on overnight, and instead shut it down). You get to the point where even when given a light task it’s puffing and kicking out heat as if it’s dying, because it’s been under intense stress for a long time. This doesn’t mean you can’t stress it a bit in short bursts though. Luckily the human brain has a certain ability to heal unlike a piece of silicon, but it needs rest to do so.

I’m sorry to hear about all the tough conditions you went through, and I hope you have better luck moving forward.

With regards to WaniKani, I hope everyone understands that getting to level 60 isn’t a race, and you should aim for a healthy learning environment (especially since it’s self-paced given you can do reviews whenever you want). Getting to level 60 isn’t some kind of finish line either.

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It’s not because of reviews, but my sleep schedule is currently really messed up (can’t go to bed until 3:30).
I’ll… try to work on it, but it’s difficult. Days have somehow gotten really damn short…

I mean, you really FEEL it when you sleep for an appropriate length. Especially when you do reviews the next day or try to learn new items on WK - it’s an entirely different experience when you’ve slept properly.
Why is it so difficult then to just go to sleep at a normal time? I really wonder what I’m excepting to find on YouTube late at night that makes this worth it…

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I dunno, I think ops story is a bit different, but

Personally I’ve kinda overdone it in the past but I was getting hella sleep. Like easily 10 or so hours of night or really good sleep. But I was basically studying for 8+ hours a day and learning like 60 or so words per day for weeks. Like not just immersing for 8+ hours, but rather actually fully actively studying at max attention. After a few weeks it took a pretty heavy toll on me despite getting plenty of sleep.

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That sounds like a very traumatic story and I’m sorry to hear that it got to such an extreme :frowning: .

I’m not doing nighttime reviews, but due to the lock-down (and me putting insane hours into Japanese studies on top of daytime work) since a couple of months now my sleep schedule is a disaster and my short term memory is nearly defunct. Earlier there were some other symptoms, but it seems my body got used to running in maintenance/fallback mode all the time. And no, that’s not healthy at all :stuck_out_tongue: . So I would definitely second your recommendation to get more sleep if one is still capable.

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When reviewing late at night, I have been known to write and confirm answers with my eyes shut. Naturally, I’d get it wrong, since I never looked at the question.

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our university’s architecture program was really good from what i understand. they did digital but also still did hand drawn and making models by hand etc (granted this was late 90s, early 2000s). give you an idea, if you are familiar, the building for that program was named after E. Faye Jones, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright. so the standards were set pretty high there. I got a taste of how intense that style of studio work is when i transferred to a dedicated art school later on.

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i can’t handle that kind of hours anymore. once out of my twenties and past my mid thirties that kind of all nighters all week sounds like a form of torture banned by international treaty.

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to be fair, with my health issues, the timings actually work out really well. i end up staying up around 36hrs at a time very often because of muscle pain and my respiratory issues. then i’ll crash for like 9-14hrs. so it oddly ends up about right with srs for me in a twisted way.

yeah, i sit around 95% accuracy. this is all due to a serious issue where my gallbladder said ‘f you i’m out’ and complicated things with my physical genetic disability five years ago. i had been close to level 30 in wanikani at that time and only recently got back up to taking japanese learning seriously again so i reset to get my legs back as far as kanji goes. so i’m not exactly a fresh run (albeit there are a lot of new radical mnemonics that are throwing me off from what they used to be lol)

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Give us updates! Wishing you a full recovery :blush:

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I have my drinking rule. 12 hours from glass to gas as the pilots like to say. In my case, no using my table saw, or doing WK reviews after that first beer. But in all seriousness I don’t think a blanket ban on reviews is wise. I don’t typically do reviews after 9pm because I’m just tired but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work for some people.

That said your situation sounds pretty horrible, and I’m sorry for what you are going through. It serves as a good data point for people to make choices about how and when they study.

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Thank you! :two_hearts:

Now I am even in a worse situation because I stopped drinking coffee and cancelled the sleeping pills, which seems to be counterproductive as well.
There is also some food that seems to help.
Let’s see, maybe not all is lost.

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Yay for food

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I found no problem reviewing iKnow in the nighttime as it is not giving me any stress. I wouldn’t do that for WK, though; I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I missed the SRS stages or missed a burn? That’s worse.

WK should improve the app to decrease the stress it created on its users. 1-year marketing is unhealthy. So I never do WK in nighttime; I’d instead do other things. Now I only do WK during the daytime, and it gives me less stress than it used to.

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But that’s not their problem, is it? They’re not our moms, our sleep schedule and taking proper care of ourselves is our responsibility.

Tomorrow I only have 67 reviews, so in that case I like to stack a few of them up and do them all once before bed, usually at around 1AM. If the website locked me out and went “now now, sweetie, time for beddy-byes, come back during the day” that would just be annoying lol

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… you’d just reset the clock on your laptop.

If your review cycle is just an offset from the last time you reviewed an item in UTC time, then this should work fine. Hypothesizing: WK makes you think those reviews are at 11pm, but really they’re just +N hours from the last review for that item thrown into a bucket for which that timer wheel on WK’s server has elapsed.

Which gives rise to the userscript, “Tell WK it’s always High Noon

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Mostly I find that my percentage drops like a ROCK at night. I review once or twice a day, maybe more if I’m bored on weekends. Inevitably if I skip a day and do a bunch of reviews the following morning my percentage goes way WAY up. I just cannot be trusted to do anything past 7 pm (or at least, not anything that doesn’t get to be double checked).

People work well at different hours! I agree its a little nuts to be waking up in the middle of the night to do reviews, but maybe that’s how they roll. Everyone needs to sleep more though.

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It is proofed in scientific experiments that you are right. That is the whole purpose of sleep, to organize and reinforce memory.

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