Delete please5

I don’t even really use it for that as I just have a routine. But it does help with things like “I might as well wait until 9pm to do my reviews because that’s when the most will appear”. Before I starting using timeline I was doing reviews nearly every hour in the evening cos I was never sure how many and when they were going to appear.

Drove my partner crazy :grin:

But if you’re at 18 then you must already have a good approach without it :slightly_smiling_face:

4 Likes

100% that.
I can also time my break at work so that it happens when a bunch of reviews will be there, and I can reduce a bit the damage before doing the rest at home in the evening.

4 Likes

I actually think there were a bunch of people before. WK started in 2012… I’m sure scripts weren’t around back then :eyes: And I also know someone from the forums who did it without scripts (they were from the old school gang).

1 Like

Emphasis on the “while staying sane”?
(I’m not saying it’s impossible, though, just very uncomfortable)

1 Like

First of all, I appreciate you taking the time to write this. It shows that you care, which I’m grateful for :slight_smile:

Second of all, don’t worry. I’m going to say something quite unpopular now, but… I wanna be done with Japanese in around 3 years and move on to another project. By being done, I mean barely any hours of studying and mostly learning through pure, unintentional exposure.

The thing that makes me significantly more happy is helping others and making the world a better place. Everything else is pretty much secondary (aka meh), including Japanese. It doesn’t excite me as much as giving my time to others (this is why I’m having trouble leaving the forums), but that itself doesn’t mean that I dislike Japanese. Not at all. I’m at peace with it. It’s a means to an end. I appreciate it.

I’m a firm believer of habit formation (show up to do the work every day), but I also like the line of thought “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.” If I can handle a certain level of intensity without seeing it negatively, I will. But if it doesn’t make me go out of my comfort zone, then I prefer not doing it at all.


(Sorry for derailing the thread xD)

5 Likes

“Ignorance is a bliss”.

If you’re not aware of better, easier, faster solutions and you’re already into something, will you still think about losing your sanity? xD No, things just naturally balance themselves. I’m sure the older generation didn’t go nearly as fast as we did.

We’re only afraid of the things we see :man_shrugging:

2 Likes

Ha! My big issue is that I unburn old level’s kanji and cry when I get 10% accuracy the first time through. The good news is that it is easier to restore these into memory the second time… but then realize you have a second round of “these two kanji that I burned many months apart from one another sure do look similar and now I keep confusing them”.

In short, there is no easy road and there is much pain to come, but as someone else said, it must become part of your daily routine. I’m proud to say I’ve never missed a day where I didn’t do at least a handful of reviews and I never used vacation mode once. I recall on multiple occasion sitting on the tarmac at Narita frantically trying to get cell service so I could crank up doing reviews I couldn’t do for the previous 14 hours. If Kanji becomes a way of life, you will be rewarded.

2 Likes

Thumbs up. We are lucky to have such nice senpai!

3 Likes

I do reviews as they appear sometime, but I always do them over my morning coffee and just before I go to bed, and I always do my new kanji at their correct first 2 intervals. It hasn’t really been hard for me to keep up with and doesn’t dominate my life, I dunno what to tell you. My apprentice count is pretty much always below 100 and I’m very thorough with my lessons, which takes time but I rarely get new items incorrect (less than 300 incorrect submissions from nearly 40k reviews (edit: weird flex but I’m slow, accuracy is all I got)). If I get to a point where that’s not happening I’ll probably just slow down my lessons, I dunno.

@OP, as you can see everyone has their own way of doing things, I guess the trick is to find a comfortable means of managing your workload and then sticking to it. Good luck.

1 Like

I don’t think there’s anything to tell :slightly_smiling_face: for me doing reviews being a kind of compulsive addiction in the evening, and I found it irritating not knowing what was coming up. That’s obviously not the case for you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

:point_up: routine!

2 Likes

^^Exactly what I was thinking myself :laughing:

2 Likes

I know what you’re talking about, level 5 was a slap in the face. Took me a month to get to level 6, quitting several times in the process. Then another month to get to level 7, and then I just
Capture

Like others have already said, you get better at it, your brain gets used to these weird chinese squiggly lines. Level 29 (my level as I write this) is probably harder than 5, but the experience isn’t even 1/100 of the agony that level 5 was.

1 Like

no idea what about lvl 5 is special.

maybe some guru’d items, and items you were supposed to guru, but failed, came around again.

that’s not a difficulty spike though, that’s growing pains.
this is a still gentle outlook on the path ahead of you, not yet full of nasty leeches you’d have to tackle heads on to get rid of them.

some people say lvl 14 is bad, too. i wonder why. in my experience, wk has been getting more difficult until somewhere in the high 10s, then stabilized. complexity of kanji won’t get up in general (there’s always odd cases like 響), there’s not a lot more reviews at that point yet (that’s in the 20s, when burns start).

once you get to that phase, it is what it is until you hit the fast levels in the latter half of the 40s, but you’re not forced to do them at max speed. in fact, you can always make it easier by slowing down.

the general rule is that what you pour in is what comes out. doing a level’s content in one session will produce spikes. spreading them out generates a stream. 20 items in per day will lead to 20 items out.
similarly, if you have 10 items each 10 times per day and want to consolidate, let them accumulate and do them in one go once the stack is where you want it.

wanikani really is about time management. you plan ahead 2 weeks (guru 2, after that, review times go up a lot), set review piles up to be certain sizes, and if you want to take a break, you stop new lessons 2 weeks before (else you might as well throw away everything not yet guru2, because you’ll forget it).

if you’re aware of what lies before you and how much you have to give, you can set it all up for your convenience.
@jprspereira wrote a more detailed guide on it, including pacing, good companion scripts and how to handle certain cases.

there’s nothing to be worried about, but you cannot slack off. SRS punishes sloppy behavior.

3 Likes

I don’t remember level 5 ever being hard to me. but by the end of level 10 I was feeling that maybe the amount of workload would surpass me eventually during the next levels.

Thing is, that at least in my case i did not touch any other source for learning japanese aside of WK until level 12~13 where I opened my first grammar book. Idk if people say things get easier, but what they say a lot is to start to learn grammar as soon as possible, and the reason behind this has been greatly pointed out by Andi here some posts above, you see, it is mandatory that you practice what you learn here studying words and kanji in context.

I do not know if you have started to do so, but anyway, what I believe is the main reason to feel unmotivated or down around here is the feeling of being burned out, if you do badly in your reviews you would feel like that, and its only natural. So I’d say you need way more exposure to the kanji you’re learning here. And there is no way you could mess up with SRS system by learning from other sources, because if you really know that well an item you’ll end up burning it,

More than that, if you know fair well many items you’ll do your reviews way fast and better, and you’ll feel better about your performance and motivated to keep going on. It is important that you get to know your own way of learning, do not compare to others if this brings overwhelming feelings.

TL;DR WK is merely a tool to learn kanji, and to learn kanji fast, because of this its easy to progress fast but get things unbalanced with other aspects of language learning. For a better experience adjust your pace and look up other sources to complement for what WK lacks, just don’t give up, and don’t forget that it will still be a bit painful, but it’s worth it.

2 Likes

I’m wondering when this is going to get hard, and I think it is soon. I’d been learning Japanese for a couple of years and tried to pick up kanji as I went, so I feel like most of the kanji up to now (level 6) have been stuff that I was familiar with. I’ve just been able to charge through the first few levels. In may ways the wacky names for the radicals have been harder than the kanji and vocal - so far.

No doubt the wall is coming and I’m going to hit it soon. Probably not helped by the fact that I have been glossing mnemonics unless I have not known what it is referring to.

As far as boosting my confidence - trying to read as much Japanese as possible. Tangoristo, Satori Reader, and the few manga I have found that are simple enough for me to get to grips with without too much frustration.

there’s one particularlity about SRS you should be aware of:
as you proceed, you will accumulate leeches (items that just won’t stick). the longer you go, the more they will become, filling your days with terrible, mind-crushing no-dice piles.

set one day of the week up as “leech tackling day” and get them memorized, any way that helps. look em up, drill them, whatever helps.

that way, you stay in control.

I started wanakani with very little kanji knowledge and from my experience it has most definitely gotten much more difficult since then, and I expect it to continue getting difficult. Even Japanese people struggle to read their own language depending on the content, so I don’t expect it to ever just be easy for me.

Best advice is not to worry about mistakes, don’t worry about the items that aren’t sticking for you. I personally feel the most important thing you can do is look at kanji everyday. Try to make it a point to use wanikani everyday. You will eventually overcome whatever hurdle is in front of you, just for a new one to be put in front of you. You will never finish studying kanji. As long as you can accept that and not mind the mistakes, you can definitely finish wanikani and then some.

Level 7 seems a lot harder, a lot less familiar stuff. Ask me in a week if it is the wall or not.

I’m not sure if WK increases that much in difficulty as it does in workload intensity. You’re packing more stuff into your brain and your review stacks start to grow, so you need to spend more effort clearing them. Honestly, Kanji with a lot of strokes aren’t the most difficult part, it’s the ones that look a lot like each other (or vocab with tricky meanings/readings) that can trip you up. As long as you turn WK into a daily routine and find a rhythm that works for you, you’ll end up ok.

Mistakes will happen. Typos and mix-ups will happen. Don’t beat yourself up over incorrects and instead use them as learning opportunities. Let the SRS do its work. I find that the ones I get wrong I usually end up knowing much better later down the line, since the alarm bells go off and I spend some time figuring out my mistake (did I confuse it for something else? Was it a typo? Etc.)

The best way to increase confidence is to make sure you’re giving yourself ample time to study and allow info to settle in, and then hit at minimum your 4-hour review within that same day, and ideally the 8-hour. Also spend some time perusing Japanese materials even at an early level, since it’s fun to meet your WK Kanji out in the wild. You won’t understand a lot right away, but you’ll be training your eyes and your brain to become more familiar with Japanese overall, which will pay off later.

1 Like

Agreed

Agreed

1 Like