Anyone else facing burnout?

Motivation will only get you so far. Wanikani is definitely not gonna be fun the whole way through. The fun will ebb and flow. You’ve gotta get some discipline going if you want to actually reach your goals.

I’d recommend putting aside some time as being for both WaniKani and another thing you like. By doing X number of reviews every so often while doing the other thing, you can make the pile of reviews far less intimidating. I got a pretty long way playing Darkest Dungeon and clearing 20 reviews between battles. So if you like games, play a game for a few hours, clearing 10 or 20 reviews after set goals. If you like reading, clear 20-30 reviews after finishing a chapter. Any hobby that you can stop and go with works.

I’ve also found certain types of music are good for keeping my heart in studying. Personally, I’m big on lofi and jazzhop. Pull up a playlist on Youtube, turn the volume down on the video, then turn the system volume up 'til its where you like it. This way, the music won’t drown out the reading audio. Here’s what I’ve been listening to today:

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Don’t try to read Genki all in one go! Set a goal for yourself so you can progress steadily. For example, do one chapter of Genki every two weeks. Then make a schedule for how that might look.

For example:

Monday: read through the dialog and listen to the audio.
Tuesday: go through half the vocab list and add it to Anki
Wednesday: the other half of the vocab list
Thursday: listen to audio of the vocab list and then the audio of the dialog again. Marvel at how much more you can understand vs Monday.
Friday: Read half the grammar
Saturday: read the other half of the grammar
Sunday: rest :wink:
Monday: Do half the exercises
Tuesday: Do the other half of the exercises
Wednesday: Do half the exercises in the workbook
Thursday: Do the other half of the workbook exercises
Friday: listen to the audio of the dialog again.

Of course, you could go faster or slower, do everything in a different order, etc. The point is, make a big goal and then define concrete, time-based steps you can do to make it to that goal.

Japanese grammar can be very difficult in the beginning. I had to go through the concepts in chapters 1-5 in Genki twice in classes before they finally sunk in. When you get used to Japanese, it becomes easier and easier to pick up new grammar concepts and then you can speed up your learning if you wish. Just take your time in the beginning and let your brain adjust to thinking in Japanese.

I second reading some graded readers! Level 0 if you know absolutely nothing or Level 1 if you got through a few chapters of Genki already. There’s a thread now about graded readers.

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If you are trying to do everything by yourself, I really commend you. I’ve been taking Japanese classes twice a week for a 14 months now – it’s the only real way I could really get a handle on the grammar and sentence structure. This is coming from someone whose partner is Japanese. But more power to you if you can do it alone! If you finances allow it, even taking a weekly class would really assist you.

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I’ll throw my hat here and say that consistent progress will be faster than going hard and burning out. I averaged 21 days per level up for the first 10 levels, and while that is slow it allowed my to stay on top of my reviews and mete out my lessons at a comfortable pace so it was never hard or frustrating. Gradually as I got better at learning I increased the pace of lessons, but I think you should prioritise doing reviews every day and not lessons. If you don’t get around to doing lessons or don’t feel like it, the world won’t end, but doing so many lessons that a consistent review schedule is unmanageable is a fast track to burnout, frustration and quitting.

Everyone is impatient to learn more now but learning a language won’t happen overnight, you need to be able to maintain consistent learning for a long, long time, so start reasonable and comfortable and build it up from a place of comfort and stability.

I would also follow other recommendations to drop down a few levels to clear your review schedule a bit, multiple huge review sessions with many errors will not motivate you.

Edit: physically writing out a daily schedule for learning is not a bad idea either, I have to use a task manager to keep my various pursuits in check so including Japanese in that wasn’t a huge ask but it helps monumentally in keeping yourself in check with what you have time for and how much you are physically capable of learning.

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Language learning definitely requires consistency, so burn-out can be a real threat to your progress. On the one hand, if you keep pushing, it’ll probably get worse. On the other, if you take a break, you’ll have to “reboil the water” so to speak. Perhaps you can find a middle ground. When I was overwhelmed with other obligations and just couldn’t get myself to do my grammar lessons or my reviews, I tried to at least stick to a bare-minimum routine. Just five minutes a day if necessary. That takes little motivation, but will at least keep you making progress and - possibly more importantly - keep you in the habit of regular study. I’ve used this technique for other things too, like exercising. I figure I can do three push-ups when I get up no matter what. Not as great as a full body workout at the squat rack, but it’s something. Eventually, the thrill will come back and you can ramp it up when you are ready.

In regards to grammar learning, I learned my third language using multiple grammar books and exercises. This wasn’t as effective as I had hoped. Later, I learned a technique from a really good language learning book that suggested simply reading your grammar book through every few months. Every time you read it through, more and more things will make sense. If there are exercises, do them mentally as writing them wastes time, and look up the answers immediately. The important thing is getting as much observation of how the language works as possible. This supports the natural process that your brain must go through of pattern recognition. No amount of rule memorizing will ever make the grammar really stick in any useful way. Ultimately, the grammar must just become a part of you. This is just like your native language; sure various rules were solidified by learning them in school, but in reality you know most of your grammar because it either sounds right or doesn’t sound right.

Hope these thoughts and everyone else’s helps you and that your motivation returns to you soon!

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About the Lvl.7 “blues”… I didn’t got those… in my case sounded like the level 25 blues… I guess treatment should be the same though. :wink:

Do reviews but no new lessons… first days not so different… but then… those will shrink… and shrink… and eventually you’ll have like 20-30 review per day or even less… and then everything will be 大丈夫 … I promise :wink: … I did this for a whole month… and then when new lessons… I paced those more slowly than pre-crisis … until it felt ok again to retake my old speed.

Meanwhile… find something that you enjoy doing in japanese. Picking up a graded readers if you feel those beginners club choices are still too hard (which is totally normal… any native content will blow you at first no matter how much Genki / Tobira lessons you’ve gon trhough)… only reading helps you at getting good at reading… just find material that helps you learn while having a good time… (enything with more than 5 new words per page will be too much).

A similar approach to listening: watch a show (a short one, 30 mins for example). watch it raw or with jp subs… see how much you get… watch it later with english (or your L1) subs…
no whinning (because you don’t understand as much as you want)… in total it’s just an hour of your precious time, and half of it you’l be understanding everything… But the first time you watch an episode, you’ll realize how much you understand (aided with visuals) and progressively see the gap of all that you don’t understand yet.
No rush with this approach… i did a couple of 10-12 episodes shows in about 2-3 months…
extra point for ripping the audio of that show and listening as passive immersion :wink:
Listening constantly something you WANT to listen will be a booster to your listening abilities…
I mixed with something a bit more complicated to kept reusing those shows… sentence mining … but in any case watching and listening constantly was a great help.

After that month … heck … even 2 months of slowing down… and doing other activities… hopefully you’ll see more connection regarding what WK and Anki is teaching you with actual content and fun stuff…

now just keeping doing the same… and remember if you collapse again favor immersion… that will most likely turn you back into doing the other stuff once you feel better.

As for grammar advice… well, no advice , just my experience… I hated Genki… finished the last chapter of Genki 1 … planned on getting the second one … buth loathed that one too. So I kept reading and reviewing new things I bumped into using grammar reference books (Handbook of Japanese Grammar Patterns for learners and teachers … or something similar :yum:)…

No noticeble harm was done I think by that approach… reviewing grammar on the spot made it more digestable… and improved the taste that textbooks and drilling left me with…

Anyway take everything I said with a grain of salt… basically know that there’re different approaches besides textbooks and SRS apps… and can work well alongside or even on their own if you become too stressed :wink:

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Oh wow alright that’s a lot more replies than I had expected to get. Normally I would quote specific people but there seems to be a lot of overlap in the advice here.

In terms of WK I’m not going to reset my level like some suggested (although I do appreciate the idea), I’m just going to do my best to power through it and get my reviews down to normal before going ahead with more lessons.

There were a lot of good suggestions with learning grammar. The people who said building a routine is important were totally right, so far I’ve been very sporadic with my Genki reading. I also downloaded TangoRisto and I’ll look into BunPro some more once my WK is under control. Another tool I saw mentioned a bit was Anki, which I do have but have been very bad at keeping up with, so I just need to build up a routine with that.

Thank you guys for all the suggestions.

Edit: oh and the graded reading, I forgot to mention it above but thanks for putting that on my radar. I’ll check it out

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To keep from burning out, the important thing is to set yourself achievable goals and don’t let WK dictate your pace. Is your goal to make it to level 60? Or is it to learn Japanese as best as you can?

I burned myself out a couple of years ago - I had too much other stuff going on, and my review queue started to climb. The number got so huge that I got demotivated every time I came back to Wanikani. What finally got me back was setting a definitely achievable goal: 25 reviews a day and no lessons until I got the queue down to zero. It was usually a bit more than 25 - get to the next multiple of 25, then maybe keep going until I made a mistake. Once I set that, It took about 4 months to clear (after 4 years of false starts). But carving out time to do 25 a day was completely doable - “I need to get rid of these 1500 reviews” was not.
Once I cleared them, I set some different rules to keep myself from burning out again. I’ve never done lessons when I had anything in my review queue, but I also added “No lessons when the Next-24-Hours number is more than 100.” and “never more than 25 lessons at once.”
I passed a level the other day, but haven’t looked at anything new, yet. It seems that a have a bunch of higher level reviews are coming in, so my 24-hour-number is climbing pretty fast. Which means those 66 new lessons will be sitting there for a couple of days. That’s fine - they are not going anywhere.
Good luck.

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I would recommend trying out Lingodeer for grammar. It’s a Duolingo-like language app that’s specifically designed for Asian languages. It’s really easy to follow and will help you get a decent handle on Genki 1-2, JLPT N5-N4 grammar without feeling like you’re really working too much. I feel like wanikani is enough work sometimes, so I try to keep my other Japanese learning resources as “easy” feeling as possible.

Another upside of Lingodeer is that you can set it to display vocabulary in kanji only or kanji with furigana, which can really help reinforce the kanji you learn on wanikani. I’ve even had a few levels on wanikani recently where I already knew 10-20% of the kanji and vocabulary because I had encountered them on Lingodeer.

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I would just like to double on the graded reader advice. It can do wonders for your self-confidence.

Here are some free ones from various levels:

Some people would claim that discipline is better than motivation, but I guess not everyone is the suck it up and just do it kind of person. These little things help, so you feel like you didn’t knew nothing, and now you do now something.

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I’ve reached that point a few times - where you look at half of the stuff in your reviews and just groan. What has helped me is to back out a bit and pull out what’s causing the struggle (for WK that would be resetting down a level or two), catch back up with the older reviews I’m more comfortable with, and then continue progressing from there. I’ve generally found burnout starts happening when you are trying to learn too much new material at once and your brain can’t keep up.

If you feel unmotivated to use the study material in general, then maybe you need to drop it for something else. I have dropped quite a few materials that weren’t working for me. Genki is often considered the golden standard, but I’ve made much more progress when I dropped it in favor of Tae Kim’s guide + Bunpro.

I’ve also had to drop study materials because I had too many to keep up with. I’ve dropped Anki because it was redundant and added too many extra reviews I didn’t need.

I keep up with WaniKani, KaniWani, and Bunpro, but I usually only do lessons in 1 at a time. I’ve been on level 21 in WK for 80 days now because I’m focusing my efforts on new grammar.

It may not get me to 60 in a year, but steady progress is the way to avoid burnout and still get to the end.

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Every single WK user has reached this point at some point. I, being someone who always wants to one-up everyone else, made it a point to get up to 2,600+ reviews (I didn’t actually do this on purpose, rather got distracted with life and didn’t pick it up for a few months). 1 week later and I’m at 1,400 reviews. The point in this paragraph is to say that this happens, and not to worry. Even 20-30 reviews a day and that will whittle down in no time.

This is strictly preference. I personally purchased both Genki I & II and did not start reading through Genki I until I was around level 5-6. I read maybe 40% through and then started hitting kanji harder. In short, I learned that there should be a balance between the grammar you learn and the kanji you learn.

In my opinion, the more kanji you know, the better it will be for your grammar progress, and here’s why: if you’re trying to learn Japanese grammar, without a solid knowledge of kanji, you’ll be spending so much time looking up kanji that it’s going to seriously impede your grammar progress anyway, even if that’s your main focus.

For example, let’s say you read up on some grammar notes, and you understand the grammar point right away. Great! Awesome! Okay, so you come to an example sentence that reads: この中国の留学生は入試験を合格したから米国で高等学校に行くことが出来るよ! … you may have just learned what から means and how it works grammatically in a sentence, but you will still look at that sentence and have no idea what it actually says. To me, it would be much more beneficial to understand what those kanji mean, and then plugging them into a sentence with grammar I’m unsure of – I’d be able to understand “okay, it has something to do with a Chinese foreign exchange student, an exam, and being able to go to high school”, and it’s just those little grammar points that will tie it all together.

Idk if anything I just said made sense, but in my head that’s how I looked at it. To put it into perspective, I only read 80% of Genki I and was only level 6 when I passed the JLPT N5. But because I kept it “balanced” between grammar and kanji I was able to comfortably pass that exam.

:man_shrugging: but what do I know?

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I didn’t read all the replies, but first few had some good advice to give.

I just wanted to share what I do. I go full speed, but at level 7 I started to feel a burnout coming. Once I hit lvl 8 I only did the vocabulary lessons, not the radicals or kanji of that level. Then I only did reviews for a month, the more you do them the further back you push them, so even ended up having days with zero reviews. I felt so much better, and the workload got so much smaller since I’d pushed so much to master/enlightened that wouldn’t come back in a long time!

Then I continued full speed again until I hit the early twenties, felt a burnout coming again so I stopped at lvl 23, for a full month again. Kept doing reviews, but no lessons. Worked my reviews down to basically zero (even with old items coming in I still had some days with zero reviews coming in!)

I will probably do another two breaks or so along the way. Breaks without putting in vacation mode, cause I want the reviews to come in so I can push them along and make the upcoming reviews much much smaller.

I haven’t done enough about grammar though. I’ve completed Japanese From Zero 1 and 2, plan on finishing the rest. Also have Genki 1 and 2, but not started them yet. I like to use Bunpro to test my understanding and usage of it though. I started reading without having enough grammar under my belt, but the exposure helps me pick up the grammar more easily when learning it. I read a lot that is way above my level, then pick up something a bit easier and get amazed how much I understand =P (I read some of the manga Aria in fall, thought it was too hard. Read Girl Who Leaps Through Time (book), now I feel Aria is easy, and that I understand so much more! I haven’t done any grammar practice in a long time, so was just more exposure and a bit higher WK level)

I guess the best tip I can give is do something you love. I love to read, so even if I find it is much to hard, I enjoy the process so it is still worth it. I have fun while doing it and enjoy the learning.
Same with WaniKani, I enjoy learning new items, so it is fun =)

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Disclaimer: WK isn’t my only activity for learning Japanese and I consider Kanji as a foundation for other aspects.
In the meantime I settled on a nice weekly routine.

  • Level up on wednesday night. Guruing radicals and primary kanji batch with Overwrite.
  • Start secondary kanji batch on Sunday noon and guru them until Wednesday night.
  • Review lower level radicals and kanji without Overwrite.

If I have time I also do vocab from low to high level. BTW I will be at 18 in 2 hours :slight_smile:

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I’m going to be a little radical here and say that my recommendation would be to reset your WK and stop focusing on kanji unti you’ve learned some vocab and grammar. To me, kanji is practically useless without a fundamental understanding of Japanese, but that’s my opinion entirely and you’re free to disregard it.

I would say that knowing kanji makes vocab acquisition much easier and working with verbs/adjectives easier to conceptualize. It’s easy to see how 寒い becomes 寒かった or 寒くない or to see why 綺麗 or 有名 are na adjectives even though phonetically they end with an い.

Also, it can make vocab readable without ever seeing in the first place and makes memorization easier. 本屋 - “book” + “store” = bookstore or 医者 - “medicine” + “person” = doctor etc. It is much easier to remember doctor as two kanji instead of いしゃ as an arbitrary combination of sounds.

If you simply want to be conversational ASAP then maybe slack on kanji but otherwise I would say it should be a top priority.

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Just some quick hitters since you got a lot of replies already

→ Level 7 may just be a bit weird, having just finished it level 8 is a lot easier

→ If youve already unlocked your second set of Kanjis, doing everything when its available you will level up in about 3-4 days.
This guide will help you better understand how WK works and you can set your own leveling schedule.

https://community.wanikani.com/t/my-journey-of-368-days-the-ultimate-guide-for-wk/31318/2?u=sorar

→ Beginner book club means beginner Native material, its doesnt mean actual beginners of learning Japanese so no need to be discouraged. Graded readers, Satori reader or other curated material for adult learners may be a better guage of your grammar progress.

→ If your short term goal is Reading then grammar is your top priority because its much easier to look up vocabulary than trying to figure out grammar as you go.

While Genki is decently comprehensive (even better if you have the workbooks too for practice), imo its better suited for guided learning cause its dense on new information. Personally would recommend reading either TaeKim Guide (Basic Grammar and Essential Grammar) or Human Japanese (Beginner and Intermediate) then use Genki as more of a reinforcement/practice tool. Both of the above will be lighter reads than Genki.

  • Human Japanese is ordered like a conventional textbook but has a warmer tone to its presentation. Almost all the example sentences are voiced. (~$10-20 or there should be a Free Trial version in all formats)
  • Tae Kim is ordered a bit differently but if you go through the Basic and Essential sections you will have what you need to go through Genki more easily. (Free online)

For your situation, I would recommend HJ more than TK to start since its an easier read. Start Genki after HJ beginner, then read HJ intermediate, then do Genki II. HJ intermediate material covers part way through Genki II.

Genki study tools

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Some rules I use for myself to avoid burning out :

  • Never, under any circumstance, am I allowed to do lessons if my review count is not 0.

  • Don’t reorder vocab lessons. This one is more personal because almost all my kanji mnemonics are “which words use this kanji?”.

  • 100 Apprentice items : Only vocab and current level lessons allowed.

  • 150 Apprentice items : No lessons allowed.

  • 200 Apprentice items : Consider reseting a level. You’re struggling.

  • If possible, try to still do some lessons when you want to take a break, even just 5 a day. It’s fairly annoying to start doing lessons again after a long hiatus of only reviews because it’s no longer part of your daily routine. I recently switched from doing my lessons whenever I felt like it to 20/day to get a more constant daily workload.

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I’m just running on fumes at this point. But I’ll be “done” (by which I mean level 60) in a few days. So: delayed burnout. I’ll be so happy when I no longer have to keep up this (self-directed) punishing pace.

But that’s also kind of why I’ve gone fast; so that I could be done quickly enough not to burn out in the middle.

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Almost there @Sezme !! Keep it up !
WK final levels were also very tough on me, my state was like in a disaster movie : a nuclear reactor about to melt down, WARNING OVERHEATING displayed everywhere and blinking red light left and right.

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Hey there, I’m sorry…but I didn’t read everyone else’s comments…but I used the Genki textbooks in college and my Japanese teacher had a sort of reverse classroom system, where she would create lecture videos about the grammar and we would have to watch the videos and complete homework based from those lessons and then we would just practice speaking and take quizzes during the actual class. I’m not sure if she has done every lesson and I am going to go back through it to refresh my own memory soon when I skim the Genki books again, but I wanted to provide a link to her Youtube…she hasn’t uploaded any videos since the time I was in college, but I hope they can help you while you are going through the Genki books at least. <3

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