Hello WaniKani world. I started a new job 10 months ago and my rigorous 3 to 5 times/day WK reviews basically came to a full stop. I’m ready to begin working consistent Japanese study back into my daily life, however, one or two short study sessions per day is about all I can manage right now.
I’m on level 25. If you were me, what would you do? Push through the 1622 reviews or do a reset and start from square one?
I’m leaning more towards starting over. I’ve forgotten so much and I’m afraid that getting reviews wrong hundreds of times will really kill my motivation. But I just can’t bring myself to press the reset button quite yet
Well, this is not a reply, but it depends on you
More seriously, if you are afraid you may have forgotten some items, they will just come back as apprentices. But I understand if you don’t want the reviews to accumulate. In my opinion, as long as you do more reviews than the numbers of news ones each day, you will go through after some (maybe long) time.
The important thing is that you feel happy and motivated to come here.
My advice is : why don’t you try to keep going for a few days and see how it goes. If it becomes a living hell for you, you can just reset
Honestly, I would reset. If you remember the items, you will get through them quite easily and you’ll have time to practice some grammar or do some reading. If you don’t, you’ll encounter them again from the start and it will probably stick easier without frustrating you with a ton of fails.
Best case scenario, you’re back to where you’ve started in about 6 months or so with some grammar practice under your belt, worst case scenario, you’ll have a good base built out for the rest of the levels.
Also, I’m in sort of a similar situation, having switched jobs recently, my advice is to use every single scrap of time you can put your hands on and increase the number of review sessions like that. That is exactly what I do, I do reviews on the train to work, during breaks, when there’s some downtime and on my way home, and I manage well enough with only 1, sometimes 2 larger, dedicated review sessions in the evening.
I wouldn’t reset all the way to level one. You’ll end up doing a lot of pointless reviews and it can end up being demotivating to see no “new progress”. You can always reset a few levels at a time and get a feel where you are at remembering stuff.
In your shoes I’d try to do some review sessions for one week to get an impression of my retention, then if I thought resetting would be good I’d start by resetting to level 15 and try again for a little while before going all the way back. It’s not comparable but I was gone for half a year then on impulse reset from level 8 to 1 because I didn’t anticipate remembering much but most kanji I still remember clearly when they turn up in my lessons. So it’s best just to check if you value the months it’ll take to redo the levels.
I’ll suggest resetting back 1-3 levels (so, to level 21-24) to get rid of the least familiar items and then trying that for a little while.
If you’re still getting too many things rolling around in aprentice you can always go back a little more later.
Good luck
Tbh, I personally can’t go for more than 100 reviews without severely losing focus at the end and making more mistakes while also being considerably slower at it and anything above that just feels like pure torture. What I did when I had a lot of reviews was that I took a month off and always set myself goals, like “I won’t let the review count raise above x from now on” and as I lowered these goals, all of a sudden I had no more remaining with a mostly cleared up apprentice queue.
However, If I had to do it again, I would probably reset a few levels. As I mentioned in the thread, I was dealing with big blocks of reviews for months afterwards. I think it would have been much easier to reset and lower the number of pending reviews in order to smooth out the long tail.
I did not even realize that was an option! Thank you so much for this. I just checked the knowledge guide on how to do this and I think I will start by resetting a few levels and go from there.
Thank you everyone! I really appreciate all of your perspectives. I had no idea resetting to specific levels was an option and I think that’s where I will start. Cheers
