1600 reviews after almost a year break at level 11. Should I reset to 1, some other level, or another solution?

WaniKani Requesting Help
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I’ve got a pile of 1,600 reviews, most of which accumulated over a few months of me not doing reviews for a while as it snowballed last year. I’ve been trying to get back on it but never make progress, and with the time passed I’ve forgotten the majority of it.

So I’m thinking of resetting, except grinding the early levels again seems tedious especially with the minimum time to progress. Also having to do reviews again for cards I will definitely already know.

Other option could be to pick some in-between point. I’m thinking of resetting to 6.

Any thoughts or suggestions? Or anyone who did or didn’t reset have experience to share?

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Regardless of how you decide to do it, the real question is how will you avoid making the same mistake again. Why did you stop doing your reviews? That’s the most important point IMO. Whether you reset to level 6 or 3 or 1 or just stay where you are and power through the reviews is not that important in the grand scheme of things.

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It was basically going through it too fast and having like 100-200 reviews a day which eventually when it coincided with bad timing made it quickly snowball.

My problem with trying to clear the queue without reset is right now I can’t progress reducing the pile, because I’m spending so much time trying to remember what things are and have 1600 reviews in a kind of random order. If it asked me level 1-6 questions I would get most of them right and could work my way up but it’s mixing super easy ones with later ones that I’ve forgotten and it takes me ages to do like 30 reviews, and then the next day I basically have almost the same amount back in the queue anyway

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Yeah it can go wrong fast, if you stop doing new lessons the reviews should calm down after a few days. You really shouldn’t stop doing reviews no matter what, if you even just did 50 reviews/day without new lessons you would have caught up in less than a week probably.

As for the reset, again, I think you should do what feels right, resetting five or six levels is not going to matter in the long run, you’re not wasting a meaningful amount of time regardless of how you do it.

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Just making sure you know:
If you want to reset to a point where you don’t have to do the lessons for levels 1 through 6, you actually want to reset to level 7. Resetting means you reset to the beginning of a level, not the end.

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I think you should just go through the reviews. The ones you know will quickly disapear and the ones you don’t will return. Don’t do any lessons for now and just do reviews when you can, in small batches. You can click on the “wrap up” button to finish last few reviews and leave the rest for another time.

The reason why I don’t think you should reset is that this way you test how much you actually remember. Don’t worry about how long it will take, it is certainly shorter than going through 10 weeks of slow grind. This way you have your pace under control and you can be back on track in a week or two.

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So update, I’ve found the reorder omega plugin which lets me do reviews in order of level. It’s a lot less discouraging now as I’m actually doing the easiest ones first and getting that number down much quicker.

I’ve also reset to level 9. Figured the last 2-3 levels I probably truly know almost nothing and it’s not worth having them in my reviews. Just doing that made the number go from 1,600s to 1,100s.

I’ll see where to go from there, and if in later levels I start to not remember enough things I can do another reset to some earlier level.

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I’m glad you found a way to make things easier for you. Good luck!

And just remember – even if it doesn’t feel like your reviews are going down enough, any day you do any number of reviews is a day where you’re getting in some practice, and consistent practice is what WaniKani is all about! You can do it!

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So we’re about a month later, and I got my reviews back to 0 a week ago. I still have a lot of reviews to do regularly because out of the 1,100 or so reviews, a lot are ones I have forgotten quite a bit or mix up, so they often come back or go down to lower levels. I now have a bit more than 300 in guru, 300 in master, 100 in enlightened, and 600 in burned.

This means a lot of the “known” things are still on shaky ground and I suspect there will be surprises in coming weeks where lots of reviews come back as review stages progress, so I’m avoiding doing too many lessons for now and letting it settle a bit.

I have been doing the level 9 lessons a bit though (which I had already done before anyway), but I’m not trying to do them fast as there’s enough reviews already coming back regularly from all this backlog.

But at least I can keep reviews at 0 every day now. Looking at forecast I will have 120 reviews tomorrow though

So if anyone in a similar situation finds this thread, I’d say it’s worth it to power through reviews reordered by level, and maybe reset to a few levels back (as the later levels I didn’t know enough for it to be worth keeping that progress)

If I had done a full reset I wouldn’t be anywhere near level 9 right now and would probably be at level 3 and very bored with it.

The reorder thing definitely made a big difference as having reviews in level order made the bulk of the number go down quick as lower level stuff was stuff I knew very well. The closer it got to my current level the harder it got, hence my 300+ items in guru

And of course the biggest lesson here is don’t try to minmax level progress because it will lead to unfortunate review combos of 100-300 reviews a day and you will burn out and drop out the second your life gets too busy to keep up, like I did last year. Marathon, not sprint. Wanikani does a good job of time gating your progress, but it’s still possible to speedrun it a bit too much

Another random thought is there’s something good about that long break. I didn’t completely stop Japanese and still spent time trying to read, watch, and play japanese games every now and then. I got more used to reading kanji in real situations and also generally read Japanese sentences, so I feel like my brain had bad more time to chew on the language and consolidate a much stronger basis of assimilating it. I lost a lot of potential progress, but now progress will be easier in many ways. Wanikani is only one part of the equation and you can learn and cement a lot of kanjis in your brain through immersion. For me that was mostly getting and reading monthly issues of V Jump, and playing games like pokemon in Japanese

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FWIW, I once had over 6500 reviews outstanding. I ended up resetting from level 60 to level 46 (which reduced the peak review load to around 5300). After that, I just spent years slowly grinding it out, no reorder or anything (I’m sure that would have made things a lot easier if it had existed at the time though).

This is also true. My second time through WK was a lot easier than the first because I already knew some of it well just from natural exposure.

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damn what a read those threads were

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Congratulations – what great progress you’ve made and it’s very inspirational! I just restarted from 11 to 0 again after taking a 5 year break. I probably should have used the plugin you suggested but I decided to just burn it all down lol! Already in a month I’m at level 4 so hopefully in another 2-3 months I will be ahead of where I was but no so overwhelmed. (I only wish I had documented where I was but whatever–time to look forward.)

This time I am focusing on my vocabulary as I go instead of letting it back up. Also I am going to work on grammar and writing to help reinforce my learning. I plan to take my time and hopefully let everything sink in a little better.

When I originally stopped I had gotten really sick and my brain was just so foggy so I took a break. Then we were supposed to go to Paris in 2020 so I decided to pivot to brushing up my French for a year. Ugh–it took 2 more years to actually get to Paris then getting sick with long covid and a super stressful job and life getting in the way until finally this fall we decided to go back to Japan next year which gave me the push to start again. Whew! What a ride it’s been!

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Yeah, one of the changes I’m making now is being more strict about finishing vocabulary before starting next level, and also being more careful about not accidentally overusing double check extensions.

That and generally not trying to go as fast as possible to avoid future burnout on reviews + give it more time to stick

I’ve actually unlocked level 10 two days ago but have 70 vocabulary lessons to do from all the kanjis that got to guru before I start it

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