A very prevalent userscript in the forums seems to be the self-study script. I tried it out and was very happy with the experience.
I have doubts about the whole concept of self-studying WK material outside of WK’s SRS system. Will that not mess with my memory and give me false positives on things? I don’t want to level up on items I might have forgotten otherwise without self-study, because I do not trust myself to self-study on my own as regularly as I do WK.
I would love to know what you think about this. Especially from people who regularly use self-study, or people who made a conscious decision not to.
While SRS tries to pick intervals that hopefully work for a majority of people, you can never develop a system that everyone can use with the same results.
I think it’s mostly important to avoid self-studying material that is up for reviews shortly. Don’t self-study items that are up for review in an hour and all that.
WK assumes that you’re also studying grammar alongside, which will expose you to words. They assume you’re likely engaging with some Japanese media, which will expose you to words. Their official advice is to read as much as possible from level 20 onward, which will expose you to words.
Huge amounts of exposure are necessary for us to really start mastering a language, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it. If a word wasn’t cemented well, it’ll fail the review after that. If it gets burned and you have no idea what it is when you encounter it in the wild, you can always unburn it.
Thanks, all of that makes a lot of sense. A quick follow up question though - what should I be using to ensure that I don’t review items up for review shortly? I am guessing that I should rely on the ultimate timeline script?
It could also be noted that WK even interferes with its own SRS, since the same kanji, with the same reading might well show up multiple times in the same session. You might fail the first and then be told the correct reading, causing you to answer the following ones correctly even though you otherwise would have not, for instance.
Like @Omun said, if you accidentally burn something, you can just un-burn it. It’s not super likely to happen anyway.
I use the self-study script a lot, especially for Kanji. Whenever I level up, I go through the recently unlocked Kanji a few times, and within an hour I already know all of them by heart with readings included. I barely use mnemonics these days. Just pure repetition is enough for me to memorize and form associations between the Kanji meanings and readings. Can’t stress enough how that helped my recognition skills. I can distinguish between similar Kanji pretty easily, whereas without it I would constantly mixed them up. In my experience, the more you are exposed to Kanji the better.
Thanks for sharing your experience, it’s very valuable. I will be using the script very strongly for at least a few levels to see if it has the same impact on my learning.
If a word wasn’t cemented well, it’ll fail the review after that. If it gets burned and you have no idea what it is when you encounter it in the wild, you can always unburn it.