I basically let myself sit around level 35 or so for years due to some significant life changes killing my motivation to do lessons. I did manage to do reviews this whole time, so I actually burned quite a few items and have made further lessons much easier. Something kicked in a few months ago and I realized that I either need to use it or lose it. Being heavily invested and interested in Japanese I decided on the former and started going through lessons again and trying to level up. It was pretty anxiety inducing as I find logging in to see 300 reviews in my queue extremely daunting and a large undertaking. It’s especially hard for me to sit at the computer for long enough to crank them all out (and I honestly am not a huge fan of the mobile app… too many typos have cost me a burn. Or fat fingering the return button).
I have to say the extra study feature that was added is AWESOME. I understand that SRS is SRS, but honestly I suck at connecting mnemonics - especially the default ones that WK uses. I just don’t often remember them very well. For me the flash-card style of the extra lessons has been improving my ability to successfully memorize the Kanji / Vocab / Radicals. I basically do the lessons, then go through the “recent lessons” until I’m confident in knowing it, then I don’t do the extra study again.
Some other things I found… I have the lifetime subscription and honestly I don’t feel super obligated to burn my way to 60 really quickly. I plan on getting to 40 from here, and sitting there for a couple of months before doing a sprint to 50 to repeat the same. Doing reviews for a couple of years and removing so many items from my daily queue helped me a lot.
The hardest part for me now is staying motivated on other fronts. I’m about halfway through BunPro’s n3, and I bought (and downloaded a lot of) graded readers. I’m trying to go through one a night. I honestly don’t really understand how they are helping me, but I will let time tell on that one.
Also, amazon.co.jp + the kindle app are an amazing combination for learning Japanese.
Thanks for reading. Hope to be 40 soon! Any advice on getting through the higher levels appreciated, as well.
