After a 10-day vacation, is this normal?

WaniKani Requesting Help
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I just returned after a vacation when I was offline on a cruise. (A funny: I won the onboard (English) spelling bee with the word “teppanyaki” — my co-finalist misspelled it “t-e-p-a-n-y-a-k-i” — and the very last item I’d reviewed before turning on Vacation Mode was 鉄板 (てっぱん, iron plate).)

I’d read others’ suggestions here about Vacation Mode, and I’d tried to mitigate by:

  1. Stopping new Lessons about a week before vacation.
  2. Keeping up with my Reviews right up until starting Vacation Mode.

When I turned Vacation Mode on, I had about 60 items in Apprentice.

My usual rules of thumb about Apprentice items and new lessons are to

  1. Pause Lessons entirely when the Apprentice number exceeds ~105,
  2. Do no more than 15 Lessons a day (surprise — I’d already settled on that when Today’s Lessons feature was launched with that as my default!), and
  3. If I’m feeling stressed out by WK, let it get down to ~75 before proceeding with Lessons again.

So 60 Apprentice items was very much in the “everything is super-chill” level for me.

So, I turned Vacation Mode off on Saturday, and began Reviews again. I haven’t done any new Lessons in over two weeks now.

I was unsurprised, and not stressed out, by finding my Apprentice items rise rapidly to 100. But it’s just kept rising — by end of day Sunday it was at 135, by last night 165, and after my first review this morning, it’s now at 172:

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I’m wondering:

  1. Laying out those daily Apprentice levels seem to show a trend line (+40, +35, +30, and now +7 with a little under ⅓ of today’s lessons done, which suggests ~+25 today) — should I just stop being alarmed, and consider this itself as progress of a sort? Am I still in a ‘stabilizing’ phase where I just need to keep at it another week or so to get back on track?
  2. I was mid-level 31 — I’d passed 21 of 24 kanji (almost all of which I’ve re-encountered so far are now back in Apprentice). Was that a bad time to go on Vacation Mode? Not that I had a choice of vacation days, and a longer time in Vacation Mode certainly wouldn’t have helped, but I knew from the day of my 三十レベルアップおめでとう！ kappas that I wouldn’t complete 31 before my trip. And I plan another trip like this next year. Should I stop Lessons when I begin the next level I’m not sure I’ll complete before vacation, in kind of a ‘soft’, proactive lesson reset?
  3. Or am I better off just resetting to Lesson 31 now? Should I wait another couple days to see if my earliest Level-31 Master items drop all the way back to Apprentice, and if they do, reset to Level 31 then?
  4. Or maybe even to Lesson 30? How do I decide when to “pull the ripcord”, and how far back to reset to?
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Haha loved that! Well done!

So Apprentice items get Guru’d after 4 days, assuming you do reviews multiple times a day as soon as possible and get them all right.
So I think it’s natural that the number hasn’t gone down now. I wouldn’t reset, I would give it one more week without lessons, then I think the number will be much lower and you can go back to a routine with new lessons.

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Sure, I understand how the SRS system works — when I said my Apprentice number was increasing, I wasn’t assigning it some sort of mysterious “progress” factor, I just meant that I was getting more Guru I and Guru II items wrong (pushing them back into Apprentice) than I was getting Apprentice 4 items right.

But the number has to stabilize and actually go down for me to start Lessons again. From others’ descriptions of resuming after vacations (albeit, much longer ones, like months or longer) it sounds like many of them do spend a long time grinding reviews, feeling overwhelmed, and then resetting.

The only perfectly on-point forum post is this one from 2019, “What happens after a week vacation”, and it describes an 8-week period of slowed progress just grinding reviews. Since I do levels in about 3 to 3 ½ weeks now, resetting would be faster than that. But that’s just one point of “anecdata”, who knows if it would hold for me?

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And I may have panicked right when I was actually turning a corner—my last two reviews have reduced my Apprentice count by 30 to 142. A little too early to be sure about that yet, but we’ll see…

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I think that’s recoverable. If you get something wrong, maybe you could take some time to review it as though you were learning it for the first time. I don’t think you should have to grind for 8 weeks after a 1-week vacation unless you’re missing the reviews every single time; even if everything in your last level drops to the lowest SRS stage, you could theoretically recover that within a few days.

Good luck!

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I may be misunderstanding but it feels like both commenters here seem to have suggested that getting every review right is the usual expectation.

My experience is quite different. Maybe it’s because I’m older and have less brain plasticity, but most items “bop around” a bit. (My percentage right in any given review session generally averages around 80%.)

Some items “just click” for me, and they whisk up the SRS escalator and are Burned after 6.5 months; but other items very much do not do that. I have six items still left to clear from Level 2 (that is, words I first “learned” 500 days ago)!

I don’t do any special outside study except for a daily review of my past 24 hours’ missed items, and maybe I should be doing something like that, but I tried Skritter and Anki — which already have all the WaniKani wordlists preloaded and shared by other users — and it was just a tremendous time sink without much benefit to my progress that I could see.

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Definitely NOT what I meant :slight_smile:
What I meant was with every review right, the apprentice item disappears after 4 days. What is more likely is that you get it wrong for a while, and do reviews a bit less often than as soon as possible multiple times a day, so an estimate for when you know your apprentice item well is more 7 to 10 days. Which is why I said give it a few more days and I think you’ll see a drop!

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Yes, what you’re experiencing is exactly what is realistically to be expected. I described things more in depth previously as well as a good way to handle catching up if needed, but the key takeaways here as it pertains to your question of whether or not it’s normal are:

SRS is genuinely an incredible tool for retention, but it can’t magically dispense with reality. This is probably the most important thing to understand in order to maintain doing it long term.
…
Unfortunately, you don’t magically stop forgetting things just because you went on vacation or had other life commitments.

The bottom line is that you first saw some items at time X and you will forget them after some given time frame Y without having encountered them again in some capacity, whether that be another review or in the wild. All activating vacation mode really does is pushes all of your reviews (including all future ones) outside of their optimal review window which means you are going to have higher miss rates on basically everything that is a large enough percentage deviation from the time frame in which you naturally forget an item without further review. It affects items that are already on longer intervals much less because the overall percentage those days you missed are of the overall time frame is small, but it still affects everything nonetheless.

That’s why vacation mode is realistically mostly more harmful than helpful in reality. It keeps you from having a huge number of reviews piled up which can be demotivating and if that keeps someone from quitting, then that part can be a positive, but, that comes at the expense of actively screwing with the SRS intervals for everything you’ve already done in a negative way.

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I don’t think you need to get every review correct. It’s completely normal to miss some of your reviews, even if you’re doing WaniKani consistently.

I agree with @MikeyDC65. I believe that using vacation mode for 1 week is going to have the biggest effect on reviews for items at stages with timings less than or on the order of 1 week. It’s going to be detrimental for your Apprentice and Guru items. Realistically, a 1-week break isn’t going to have a huge effect on reviews for Master or Enlightened items, where the timeline is on the order of months.

I think you might be experiencing the combined effect of your usual missed reviews, which have little to do with the break, and forgetting new material for which you’ve missed the typical SRS timings. Together, these may seem overwhelming, and you may be attributing the former to having used vacation mode because it’s at the front of your mind. I think that you should see your Apprentice count drop within a week or two if you’re reviewing the items you missed and doing reviews consistently. Don’t panic! A week isn’t going to completely derail years of progress. It will just take a bit more time and effort to recover.

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@TreyE: I was expecting to see a number in the thousands. :joy: It can definitely be a bit discouraging to see those numbers climbing, but if you stick with it you’ll be fine. Congratulations on the win, and your vacation! :slight_smile:

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Yeah, I think you may be right… Certainly I’m Burning items since returning more or less at the same rate I was before, because ten days extra isn’t much in a 6 ½ month minimum learning period.

It’s the items in Apprentice and Guru — where a 10-day extension is very significant (equivalent to artificially promoting all items to at least Guru II) — I’m struggling with.

I did take a screenshot of my Ultimate Timeline forecast before the period (it shows 993 reviews forecast in 10 days):

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I average 120 reviews items an hour,¹ so that’s over 8 hours of review. (It’s why, aside from the Apprentice-number threshold rules of thumb I mentioned above, I also limit Lessons when the timeline predicts more than 120 reviews a day—I’d like to keep my daily review time below an hour, with Lessons and mistake quizzes added on top.)

Seeing that number was what made me decide to initiate Vacation Mode in the first place, in fact.

Realistically I can do 3 hours a day, and in that time 366 more reviews would have piled up, so three more hours, during which another hour’s reviews would have piled up. So I’d clear a 10-day backlog in about 4 days of 3 hours. (Running the numbers, it seems that recovery from a no-Vacation-Mode away period longer than about six weeks would continue indefinitely, replenishing the queue faster than I could clear it, until the total queue items dropped via getting Burned—so, averaging, probably 3–4 months!)

So maybe the best choice — in terms of not messing up the SRS by “pausing time” with Vacation Mode while still allowing for relatively quick recovery — is a no-Vacation-Mode away period, followed by a reset to the prior lesson just to reduce the total in the queue?

¹ 30 seconds per item may seem slow, but it’s an average—items I get right I do quickly, but items I get wrong I stop to reread mnemonics, recheck kanji, look at visually- and thematically-similar kanji to clarify my discernment, etc., so it can easily take 4 or 5 minutes to clear them.

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Maybe just don’t do lessons in the period before you go away, rather than resetting when you get back?

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Well, like I wrote above in the OP, I did pause lessons a week before the trip. I asked whether that wasn’t long enough or if it would have been wiser to stop lessons when I passed Lesson 30 (one week before I paused lessons), knowing I wouldn’t complete the level before the trip.

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And as an update, after 5 days back my Apprentice count is down to 107 and falling, so I’m probably over the hump — we’ll see how much difficulty I have with Guru 2 → Master and Master → Enlightened reviews, which seem the most likely to be messed up long-term by a 10-day delay. I’m probably going to wait until my Apprentice count gets back down to ~85 and at least 5 more days have passed before restarting Lessons.

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I tend to turn on vacation mode at the same time I’d normally start reviews for the day. Then turn it off at the same time after my break.

So in my day that’s at about 7am so when I am back from my holiday my normal flow of items is what it would usually be in a typical day. Helps a lot.

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