I would agree with you in other cases but not if it comes to sleep and memory.
Wanikani claims that their SRS system is based on science.
Sleep science proofed that it is not beneficial but on the contrary unhealthy and damaging to the memory to be awake in the night.
And as I mentioned before, it is not my point here to convince anyone.
I just think it is my responsibility to mention it once.
It would be interesting though to test if you can improve your memory by going to bed earlier.
But as I am not your mummy this is entirely up to you.
This would be hard for me to test because one of the reasons I’m even learning Japanese is to improve my memory. I had a (benign) tumor a couple years ago that althought it’s been taken care of, I think still left some deleterious effects on my memory and cognitive skills, and I thought learning a new language would help with that. So in a way I’m conducting a test already lol
Sorry to hear that, I hope you can get better.
As I am in a similar position like you my first approach also was to study Japanese more in order to make my brain work better again, same with sports. It was not really successful though.
Now after I read the book “Why we sleep” I understand why.
It seems sleeping under the influence of sleeping pills is the same like under the influence of alcohol, it is not a very deep sleep.
And this deep sleep is necessary for the brain to be able to memorize at all.
So I change my tactics now and rather than training memory I try to fix my brain as much as possible with trying to be able to sleep as long and deep as possible.
In a way that is also what pro athletes are doing, they are careful about their sleeping rhythm and would not train in the night I think. Or at least I haven’t heard about that.
I don’t believe that WK currently looks at your local time in order to determine when to do your reviews, and in fact, if you changed your clock’s time your reviews relative to your real time would not likely change. I haven’t tested this, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to store review offsets in a user’s local timezone. If I were to magically teleport from SF to NY, my SRS interval shouldn’t change just because I’m now 3 hours closer to GMT. I mean, I haven’t tested this, but I wouldn’t implement an SRS system that was dependent upon a user’s local time. And I assume WK didn’t either.
Which means that WK would have to implement a change to their software which would look at your local time, which is just opens up the edge case can of worms. But which gave rise to the High Noon userscript joke which was too good a play on words to pass up.
I have a friend who is a physician working at a hospital. He often does night shift, during which he could have long stretches of hours with nothing going on (standby for emergency patients). He used this time to study computer science by correspondence. After doing this for several years, now he has both a postgraduate degree in medicine and computer science. I was invited to his computer science dissertation defense but I was visiting my parents at the time, so I could not come. Some people have all the brains
As long as he got his amount of continued sleep that story does not contradict the fact that doing nighttime reviews in wanikani is unhealthy.
It does not matter so much when you sleep but that it is continuous.
As a person who has worked night shift and could therefore very reasonably be expected to do reviews at, say, 3 AM, I would suggest that you stop blaming WK for your inability to organize your own life.
With regards to Japanese brutal work culture, I’m sorry but that is Japan’s problem to fix.
I think you did not read what my intention is.
To clarify, wanikanis claim is, that there is a scientific background on their SRS system.
Sleep science proofs with experiments that it is necessary to have an uninterrupted 8 hours sleep (be that night or day) to be able to have enough Non REM and REM phases to be able to organize memory.
Can you proof that this is wrong?
Because you mention that you have worked night shifts, I don’t have that experience but I am interested in how this affects memory and concentration.
But I guess you are not interested in a discussion about an interesting topic and just want to attack people?
That’s kind of like blaming a credit card company for you maxing out the card on things you didn’t need to buy.
Just because the system calculates the optimal time for your next review to be 1 am, doesn’t mean that you can’t just do it whenever you wake up without too much damage to the memorization process. The system doesn’t know, and can’t know, if 1 am is actually a time you might expect to do some reviews. Maybe you work nights? Which time zone are you in? It has no way of determining which time frame suits your lifestyle.
WK cannot easily accommodate all the time zones and lifestyles of its users. Not at the current pricing structure, I’d imagine.
I think Anki lets you completely customize your intervals, so if you want to arrange your reviews around your sleep schedule you can. Part of the appeal of WK is that you don’t need to do that work yourself. You just let their SRS do its thing, more or less.
Then could you please be so kind and tell me what the scientific background is, that makes people believe, they are learning faster and more efficient when they are setting an alarm in order to wake up for a review.
I have the insight that I know it is not a good idea but obviously other people don’t seem to understand that.
(Waiting for the next attack without any argument…)
Meh…you do you. Just because you had something bad happen doesn’t mean that
everybody else will. Everybody is different.
Also, I would take a lot of science studies with a grain of salt. Chocolate is healthy and good for you or really bad depending on which science study you read.
Just popping in to say that I understand what you mean, OP.
It’s irresponsible to pitch the program as one year. Likewise, certain individuals aggressively promote speed-running WK. While that may be fun for them, it’s destructive and backwards for the majority.
I do agree with others, that disabling nighttime reviews would be excessive. Individual schedules are complex. But, WK could do more to remind users about good usage patterns. Do lessons when your mind is freshest, and when you have time to review them 8 hours later. The actual review time is up to the individual.
Let’s be polite in here, okay? We all want the program to have good results. We’re all learning together. No reason to get mad.
And that is not true. There are sleep labs that record the brainwave patterns of thousands of people and they know pretty well by now how the connection of memory to sleep is.
Yes, reviewing after certain intervals has been shown to improve recall. No, don’t wake yourself out of sleep to do it.
Human brains are complex. Two scientific principles can be true at the same time, even when they appear to be contradictory.
Perhaps some sort of night mode could be used, where you set a time to not receive updates about new reviews for a window you determine. But that is userscript territory. WK is probably not going to impose such a window where reviews don’t become available because it was made to be as widely appealing as possible, to people living in a variety of timezones, in various stages of their lives.
tbh, does WK even do that? Like I know I opted in to get a daily review count email in the morning, but it’s only the one email. Otherwise, WK doesn’t send out other updates, does it?
Surely it’s pretty similar to not letting yourself check Facebook notifications in the middle of the night, right?
