Wouldn't a way to limit your reviews be a helpful feature for some people?

First post here, sorry if this feels kind of like a dumb rant, or if I’m talking out of tiredness since it’s like 2:30am now.

I’ve been using Wanikani daily for almost a year now, but since a few months back, things have been getting kinda out of hand, with around 200-250 reviews every day.

Having read the Japanese guide on Tofugu, I understand the learning philosophy is to try to do things fast, and I’m sure many people would manage that many lessons just fine, but the problem is that I also have to deal with school, and A LOT of homework, so I don’t have that much time.

If I want to manage that many lessons so they don’t pile up, I have to do them as soon as I wake up and later as soon as I arrive from school, sometimes also using Wanikani AT school during lunch. It becomes difficult to manage both at once.

But the biggest problem is that with that many reviews and not that much time to spend on each individual item, I try to rush things, resulting on lower and lower accuracy. On the first 20 or so levels I used to be around 80-90% accuracy regularly but now it’s down to about 60-55%, often lower than that, it’s almost a miracle when I get right more than 70%. Is this something common for other users? But since I get the items wrong so frequently, this results in even more reviews, which means I try to rush things more, and then I miss more, and get more lessons… It feels like an infinite loop.

I know there’s Vacation Mode, and it does help sometimes, but the problem with that feature is that while it’s active I can’t learn new items or do any reviews I already have. It’s not like I want to put my lessons at a complete stop, I just think it would be nice to take them slower, maybe set a limit to 100-150 a day instead of 200-250. And Extra Study mode, as much as I was excited when it came out, and as efficient as it was the few times I used it, it didn’t take long for me to realize that for my case, I was already studying too much.

I don’t know if this is just the regular Wanikani experience and most people go through that just normal, but it just feels kinda wrong that my lessons list only grows longer while my accuracy only drops and there’s not much I can do about it besides either deal with it or put them to a stop to do them later without altering how many reviews I get on each serving. Are there any tips others who have gone through similar periods can give?

3 Likes

Stop doing new lessons and keep on doing reviews until the daily load becomes more manageable for you. Eventually it will :slight_smile: .

11 Likes

Wouldn’t that take weeks? I can do that if it’s there’s no other way but I already thought I was being too slow with about 2 weeks per level

Too slow? Sometimes I’ve spent months on a level if I felt like I got too many leeches or I just struggled with reviews in general. Language learning is not supposed to be a race :sweat_smile: Especially not when you can’t keep up.
Why do you feel the need to go that fast? Whats the benefit for you?

12 Likes

2 weeks per level is not too slow. It’s more or less average.

A more radical solution would be to give up on WaniKani and switch to Anki where you can select max new lessons per day and max reviews per day, and Anki will warn you if your lesson/review ratio is off and it would hurt the SRS. For instance, I’m doing 15 new lessons + 200 reviews per day, while Anki recommends 10% as the lesson/review ratio.

Come to think of it, maybe that should also be added to WaniKani as an optional feature so that people don’t overdo it :thinking:.

1 Like

Why is it a problem letting your lessons pile up a bit? You can theoretically do 20 a day and go max speed.

The reason you take ”long” with levels is exactly that you do them all at once and can’t retain the info, thus the kanji don’t go past apprentice.

10 Likes

The way to control the number of reviews with any SRS is to stop adding new cards, or at least slow down on it. Especially if your accuracy is this low. Adding more cards at this point will just add more fuel to the fire until you get this under control.

You’ll probably find that you’ll struggle a lot less if your accuracy is higher. I’m also doing about two weeks a level, but my reviews are in the 100-150 range, not 200-250. Are you hitting the 4-hour and 8-hour review intervals on your new lesson items? I’ve found that this helps improve my accuracy a lot. Doing a consistent number of daily lessons (like, say, 10 or 15 a day) instead of binging all of your unlocked lessons at once can also help you learn the material better if you’re struggling to remember what you’ve already learned.

If that’s not the issue, then I recommend spending more time during your lessons and making sure that you have a good mnemonic for everything. If WK’s mnemonic isn’t working for you, then take the time to come up with a better one. For the items that are already in circulation, it might help for you to look at each item after you fail it and determine what is tripping you up. Are you confusing it with another kanji, misremembering the reading, forgetting a rendaku, etc.? Try to come up with a memory trick to help you with each item that you’re struggling with. Yes, this will add to your study time, but learning the item well at the beginning will save you more time in the long run.

2 Likes

Vacation mode does not limit or decrease your review numbers. It will freeze that number until the point when you exit vacation mode. That’s like putting your money inside a safe. When you open the safe, your money will be the same amount as before (unless you give me the key to your safe, then it’s going to be empty).

1 Like

You should definitely stop doing new lessons now until the situation calms down and your accuracy is up again. In your situation with school you should be under 150 or even 100 reviews a day in my opinion.

I am not native English and at some point at level 47 or so my reviews also kept increasing to about 200 a day and more causing a significant reduction of accuracy. One of the reasons was that after reencountering an item after a longer time I didn’t recall the English meaning at all.

Here is what I did:
Because I felt (which was a bit of a mistake) that I am almost at level 60 I didn’t want to slow down too much but also reduce the reviews. So for a while to create some time to think how to deal with this I cheated with having another tab of Wanikani open and looked up the answer. It took a bit longer to finish the reviews that way but as a method to handle a large amount of reviews I think it worked well. Even with cheating it takes quite some time for the SRS to show a drop in reviews so I would be really careful not to add new items in a situation where you already have too much workload.

The effect of this temporary cheating is that because you don’t go on vacation you still DO learn something, if not almost the same when doing reviews just by looking up the answers. After level 60 I stopped cheating again and now the items that have been promoted to a too high level fall back to apprentice and I learn them now. If I would have stopped completely I think I wouldn’t have started again :sweat_smile:

There is no rule that says two weeks is slow. It’s better to forget such ideas and work through it in your own pace.

2 Likes

Two weeks might be “slow” for someone who doesn’t have much going on in their life and can afford to speedrun through WK, but you’ve got school! And a lot of homework! Two weeks is pretty fast considering your workload outside of WK!

And even if it weren’t, it’s still okay to slow down if you’re struggling. It’s a lot better (and a lot less frustrating) to slow down in a controlled manner than to try and push through it anyway and have it spiral out of your control because you can’t keep up. Focus on clearing out your reviews. If you don’t want to stop doing lessons entirely, then maybe do only 5 or 10 a day. If you feel like doing more, look at how many reviews you’ll be getting in today and consider your recent accuracy, and if you decide you can handle it, do a few more. If not, they’ll still be there when you can.

1 Like

How many lessons are you doing? That’s your problem. Don’t do them all at once, try doing 10-15 a day, makes the load a lot easier. If you want to fix everything you could try stopping your lessons completely do your reviews for about 4 days with no lessons and then you can continue your lessons again, but at the new pace I mentioned above. You can use a reordering script to do radicals first, but you should keep kanji for after you clear our the last levels vocabulary. From that point on you won’t have to do that complete stop anymore as long as you stick to the daily amount of lessons and don’t try and learn more, otherwise you’ll be making it harder for yourself

Thanks for the tips everyone, I’ll take some time to get more in touch with what I already have, and take things more consistently in the future instead of trying to binge the entire level.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.