So i’ve taken a few long weekends recently to go camping. No Wifi on the side of a mountain so no wanikani for a couple days. I have a couple more planed this fall. I’ve managed to come back from one vacation mode and righted the ship just in time for the second. Which basically took all of July. Currently working on getting back on track again. The struggle is real. Not under a huge pile of reviews or anything just slogging through a bunch of 40%-60% review sessions. It’s definitely hard on morale. Plus to me it seems like there is an “Intermediate Wall” in the hell levels where the learning curve increases a bit.Just wondering if anybody had any tips/recommendations for coming back from a vacation mode. Stories, useful scripts, other resources ect. Sorry if this has been posted before, feel free to delete.
My first question would be “What is your immersion?”. My second question would be “What can you do to immerse?”.
The reason I’m asking these questions is, since for me personally WK works wonders to support my learning when it comes to items I see in the wild. But I start to struggle if I see too many items on WK only ~> For me personally immersion (reading in particular) is the key. How about you?
If you like, instead of reviewing items on WK only, go for some articles on NHK Easy, some graded readers or some of our (Absolute) Beginner Book Clubs here in the forums.
I haven’t used vacation mode myself so far so the only “story” I can share is what I intend to do in the near future. My subscription will end in a few weeks and I intend to give WK a break for a couple of weeks to give myself more time to tackle native material. I want to familiarize myself with the items I’ve learned so far before going any further.
Maybe you can do something similar. Try to encounter the items you struggle with in the wild
I’ve been using the Ask graded readers and a little NHK easy for reading and subbed anime for listening. The problem I guess I seem to be having is that my kanji knowledge has outstripped my knowledge of other aspects of the language. As the Kanji become more specific it’s harder to encounter them in something like a graded reader. Maybe a break is what I need to focus on grammer and immersion. Just worried that all the more specific kanji and vocab will be forgotten if I put wanikani on the back burner. Idk.
Haven’t come back from ‘vacation mode’ per se, but have looped back from a year and a half break wherein I failed to use vacation mode.
Your accuracy will suck a bit - it’s okay, that’s normal - you probably don’t want to take on new lessons until you feel like you’re doing better with the reviews. When my accuracy is particularly low, some side reviews of the things that I just failed are helpful. You might choose to reorder some reviews to do the higher SRS level items first - you’re more likely to remember them and it can be a bit of a confidence boost.
I do agree with tls that some more opportunities to encounter stuff in the wild might help with some of the words sticking - I’ve had a few words that really didn’t stick until I read them somewhere. Even if your grammar isn’t great yet (mine’s not), I would give it a try. Obviously depends on the amount of time you have available - I’m inclined towards slowing down on WK to make a bit of time for reading - may or may not work for you. I find even some less common seeming kanji pop up in manga and books that aren’t super complicated - if you haven’t done a whole lot of native reading, maybe try something that has been done as a book club.
You might also try looking up more example sentences for kanji that you’re finding tricky - it would give you some extra context and practice and might help them stick a little better.
And, you know, don’t be me - try to keep some forward momentum.
Thanks for the reply. Yup Lessons are on pause for awhile. I think I’ll be slowing wanikani down at this point to try and get a better handle on reading and grammer. Any suggestions on where to find good example sentences?
As you know you’ll be going away again, my best tip would be pre- rather than post-holiday work; don’t be doing lessons in the lead up to your away time i.e. make sure you have moved all newer items to Guru before you go.
When you get back, use some sort of self-study tool to refresh your memory before you turn WK VM off; I use BISHBASHBOSH but there are others.
Heyo. I did read the part where you said you weren’t buried under reviews, but, as someone envious of your predicament (I still haven’t completely recovered from this, but it’s slowly being worked on), my advice is to just do things the ‘dumb’ way (which is how I’m taking care of things over here for now): If you don’t want, or aren’t able, to muster the effort to stay on top of it all constantly, just toggle vacation on and back off between sessions so that things don’t pop while you’re away. Even if you’re not “actually” on vacation… I dunno, imagine it like weaning someone off a drug with diminishing doses, lol… Freeze the clock. Granted, this’ll cause SRS items at the same level to pile up and you’ll eliminate almost any staggering-out of items that you had going, which may mean you’d need to continue this approach even after you hit 0 reviews…
I think I’ll be slowing wanikani down at this point to try and get a better handle on reading and grammer. Any suggestions on where to find good example sentences?
OMG OMG BunPro!! It’s suuuch a good tool for grammar. I think of it like WK’s younger sibling, just for a different field.
Granted, it’s more ‘beta’ and in-development, which has both its pros and cons, but the format, tooling, and the features of its quiz mode are very rich and offer a lot of really incredible and specific feedback that, mark my words, will make you go “They have specific response for my EXACT mistake!? How??” and other exclamations of amazement. It’s the only other language service I’ve purchased a lifetime sub for, and that was something they had me sold on in just a couple of days using the tool.
Oh, and it links with your WaniKani profile to determine when you need furigana for kanji that you haven’t learned yet. How cool is that?
I typically use Tatoeba.org to take an initial look for example sentences - most of the time I find something roughly at my level (caveat, haven’t looked for super obscure vocab, so not sure how it does for that).
Thanks for the reply. I used Bunpro alongside Genki I when I first started. I got through N5 and part of N4. It was a little rough around the edges, but otherwise great. I stopped mostly because between it and wanikani I was getting burned out on SRS. I’ll probably restart N4 after I get wanikani slowed down and under control again.
