Well, I made it! I just want to say thanks to everyone on here for their knowledge and support - I learned just as much from the forums as I did from doing hundreds of thousands of SRS reviews. As someone that started on WK from absolute zero Japanese knowledge, I actually feel a little sad to leave the nest, and it’s going to be weird to leave this wonderful app behind and join the real world.
Anyhow, here are some screenshots of my progress to level 60, which started on August 29, 2017, and ended on March 24, 2021. Eventually I hit my stride with 10 lessons/day, which keeps reviews quite manageable. Hopefully this can motivate someone that, like me, hit a plateau in their desire to keep learning. Best wishes to everyone else in their studies!
I have gone down to 3 kanji a day + unlocked vocab. Usually about 5, so just under 10 lessons a day on avarage =P
My TYPICAL level is still 7, as I did “7 day levels” and had about a month pause every 10 levels or so. But then also took nearly a year off twice XD
Actually I don’t consider my accuracy to be all that great! It started out at 98-99% for the first 15-20 levels, and slowly got worse as the kanji and vocab got more advanced and obscure. Anyhow, here are some things I think I did right that kept my accuracy relatively high.
I never stopped doing reviews, so I never came back to a giant pile of words that I had forgotten.
After every review session, I opened up tabs to the items that were incorrect and studied them again, strengthening mnemonics as needed to feel confident in my recall. This is super annoying and really hurts when you have 15-20 items wrong, but it helps in the long run!
I chose mnemonics that were simple and consistent, ignoring the WK-made mnemonics when they were too cumbersome or inconsistent. When I say consistent, I mean that every time I have a reading, for example そう, I use the same mnemonic. And furthermore, that is the only reading that uses that mnemonic, so そ has a different one. I do have a couple mnemonics that are inconsistent, and those have caused me to get a lot of reviews wrong, so I regret making them that way!
I tried to remember the mnemonics for every review item, even if I could recall the meaning/reading without them. I think this is important for the later SRS stages when it’s harder to just glance at the words and remember it, but if you can reconstruct the mnemonic you have a good shot.
Right now the plan is to keep doing reviews until it’s all burned, and replace my old lesson/review time blocks with reading, which I’ve somewhat neglected outside of my textbook studies.
Thank you for sharing this. So many people finish in slightly under a year which always feels discouraging to me. Your progress feels so much more realistic as something I can also achieve.
