Jatacid will be happy to know that you can now prioritize your Reviews queue by “Apprentice first” and “Lower SRS Stages First.”
The idea here is that items at lower SRS stages (especially Apprentice timings) should be studied more on time than items at higher SRS stages. If you miss an Apprentice review by a week or two, it can be a big deal (you’ll be more likely to be unable to recall it). If you miss a burnable review by a couple weeks, you’re probably going to be okay. We wanted to make it easier to get those weaker memories recalled on time.
This is also actually part of a couple updates to the dashboard that we’re working on now (see, I told you, dashboard updates!). More on that lower in the post. If you love hovering over your current-level kanji to see when they’ll come up next, stay tuned. You’re about to be pleased and/or moderately disappointed.
The new review order options are:
- Apprentice First: This prioritizes your Apprentice Items in Reviews first. Then randomizes the rest of your (Guru+) items. If you usually finish your Reviews, I think this will be a good option for you. On days when you’re busy, or have too many reviews to do, you can finish your Apprentice items first and then go back to carving shokupan sculptures—or whatever it is you do when you’re busy.
- Lower SRS Stages First: This Reviews ordering is similar to Apprentice First, but this one just does them all in order of SRS stage groupings. Prioritizes reviews by Apprentice → Guru → Master → Enlightened.
That said, if you’re pretty much always caught up on your Reviews pile, I’d still recommend Shuffled as your ordering of choice. It’s the best one for study, I think. But, for those of you who are busy and can’t spend every waking hour doing Reviews, you can use one of these to at least get through your Apprentice reviews. Others (cough) might use this to help them level up as quickly as possible… anyways, I hope these new Reviews ordering options will be helpful.
You can change your Review Ordering in your Review Settings.
Okay, let’s talk dashboard.
I know some of you would give both kidneys to get next review time hover back on the kanji. Review queue ordering is related to that—but don’t remove your kidneys just yet. I have some bad news and I have some (mediocre?) news, and I couldn’t tell you which one is which.
Let me first share what’s coming up:
- We’re planning to add a “priority” reviews indicator option to the reviews forecast. This will tell you when Apprentice-level items will become available in your Review pile.
- We’re also planning to add a “priority” reviews indicator option to the Reviews widget. This will tell you when you have Apprentice-level items in your Reviews queue.
- We’ll add longer forecast ranges as well, so you can see a little further out (e.g. 7 days).
The idea with these features is that:
- You’ll know when Apprentice items are coming and can plan accordingly to schedule when you’ll do your Reviews.
- You’ll know when Apprentice items are available in your Reviews, so you can prioritize doing them.
This is the plan for addressing the kanji hoverpocalypse. Which, I suspect, isn’t going to make everyone happy. First of all, I’m sorry. Habit and workflow is really important. We really pulled the chair out from under you on that one. Hovering over kanji as a part of planning / workflow was a thing I never imagined people were doing. Total blindspot. I think that’s been there since the beginning, or pretty close to it. That means it’s been there for 10-15 years! Some people used it a lot.
But this plan to address it is not “bringing it back.” I’ll share my thought process on how we landed on this plan, though. And, I hope you continue to share your feedback and opinions about it / ask for a return on one or more of those kidneys you offered. We also asked for you to share how you used the old hover feature (and wow did you deliver!). So many posts in the forum, emails, chat… quite a bit of variation in terms of how it is used. Here are the main buckets:
- Doing your “level up” items on time / scheduling yourself to do reviews for these level up items. Especially for radicals and kanji. You used it to help yourself to level up faster.
- Some people wanted to manage their Review load, see when Apprentice items are coming to time their Lessons around these waves.
- Finally, the third group liked to hover over available kanji to… cough… “review” them before starting their Reviews…
There were combinations of two or three of them, too.
From there, we came up with these “priority reviews” options. It’s actually something we’ve had on the back burner for a while. Finally, with widgets, we can do it. It’s nice to be able to make features that are options and not forced on anyone.
When these options are added, the information in your forecast and Reviews queue will allow you to know when Apprentice items are coming (so you can plan ahead, schedule when you’ll do your Reviews, etc), and it will tell you when you currently have Apprentice items in your Review queue (so you can do them sooner rather than later). Combined with these new Review Ordering options, I think you’ll be able to prioritize and do your “important” (Apprentice) items more quickly, more on time, etc.
Now for the “bad” news. Or maybe it’s the mediocre news?
Within of these “priority” reviews, we’re not going to distinguish between radicals, kanji, and vocabulary. My guess is that there will be requests to pull out or distinguish items that are important for level-ups, e.g., “indicate Apprentice Radicals and Kanji of the current level.” The reason we’re not doing that is for a few reasons, but mainly:
- All apprentice items are priority — i.e. they are more likely to be forgotten, more quickly.
- I also didn’t want to say “current level items” are more important than previous level items. When you level up, those vocabulary items from the previous level that appear are important to continue to add some more of that varied context to your kanji understanding.
- I don’t want to discourage people from learning or spending time in the vocabulary. An option to only indicate radicals / kanji would imply that vocab isn’t important when really it’s probably the most important of the three item categories we have right now.
- I don’t want to encourage people to level up quickly for the sake of leveling up.
I know not everyone will agree with all this, but I am trying to make these decisions from the perspective of “what will help people to learn the most across the entire RKV spectrum.”
That said, I do think that the Reviews and Forecast indicators for “priority” reviews will get most people a replacement for what they wanted when they were hovering over kanji. It’s not exactly the same, but I’m hoping you’ll find it more useful in other ways—maybe to the point where you can live without kanji hovering.
We’re still working on these, but I wanted to give everyone an update on what we’re thinking and doing.
I am now prepared to receive your thoughts.
. Shuffle might motivate me more to get everything done and not just the miminum, so I will probably be one of those who stay “vanilla” 
. Im sure this option will be useful
. But I hope this lack of confidence is like someone having a A+ graded test and saying they dont deserve it..
has not forsaken us 
.
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