A short hiatus and I'm dying over here!

I feel like I should buy you a beer or something for managing to do that

I’m gonna need one, lol. That or a cigarette and I don’t even smoke.

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I was powering along through WK levelling up about every 8 days. Then in the spring I hit a huge work buzzsaw and started falling behind. Reviews got up over 700 and then slowly I got it under control. got back at it for a couple months keeping a good pace , then hit a bunch of travel for work plus a drop in motivation as reviews piled up. They got over 1000 and I had thoughts of quitting WK altogether. I thought about it some and realized that keeping a fast pace at WK had started to become more of a chore than something I really enjoyed doing. Also the amount of time I was spending on reviews was crowding out much needed other practice of grammar, reading, writing, speaking.

So I took a new tack and it seems to be working so far. I did a reset (something I thought I’d never do) back to level 11, and made some rules for WK study. No lessons with reviews outstanding, and no lessons if it will put the Apprentice number over 100. The amount of time spent with WK every day is much more manageable (and fun again!) and I’m building a schedule to read from Satori Reader every day (love the WK integration!), study a grammar deck, take several JOI online lessons a week. If I can squeeze it in, I’ll start writing on lang-8 again.

You need to find and set your own pace of course, but don’t let WK overload become burnout.

I’m glad you were able to reset and figure out a good system. You can definitely get burned out on trying to review too much. The thing for me was just to get the massive backlog of reviews out of the way. For the most part all I did was use the pomodoro method (2 sessions of 25 min a day minimum) with each one ending in a 50 kanji wrap-up session. This allowed me to be ahead of the additional review for that day so I was always bringing my overall number of reviews down on average.

I’m also trying not to be so hard on myself about leveling up as fast as I can. To me it’s about learning the language and not about my level. If so, I could easily cheat my way to 60. I’m doing something similar to you were I made time for other parts of the language like grammar, reading, writing, and speaking. Vocab is just one part of the overall puzzle.

Congratulations !
You’re the living proof it can be done. (Said without any sarcasm, as I tried but ended up resetting. Which worked great for me, but which I hope to avoid from now on.)

“Hiatus? I disapprove”

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Thank you. Yes, it can be. That review number can be discouraging, but it only has the the power you give it.

ごめんなさい!!!!

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