Biggest mistake using WaniKani

WaniKani
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I’m curious if others have something similar they’ve identified: a problem caused by how one has chosen to use WaniKani.

For me, it was doing lessons when they’re available – all of them…

For a long time, I thought that my biggest issue was just trying to “keep up” with reviews too obsessively, resulting in them coming back in huge piles that made it even harder for me to get through them. (Ironically, I never got into the whole “inbox zero” craze with email, but that’s sort of how I was inclined to manage WaniKani for some reason. Weird…) I think that’s a problem a lot of people face, because it feels like great progress…until you find yourself buried.

However, I later realized that the root of the problem, for me, was that seeing lessons available made me want to get through them all to go through all the new items and start to learn them by reviewing over time…but of course then I’d easily end up with 100+ reviews of new items which I really didn’t know at all (and therefore would come back around every day) in addition to any other more long-term reviews that came due. I was even timing it so that new lessons tended to come on my off days, so that I could take all the time I needed to go through them at least once or twice. In retrospect, that was not the clever strategy I thought it was… :joy:

This probably seems obvious to a lot of people, but especially for someone new to WaniKani it’s probably not really clear at all, and it’s easy to get into habits like this and self-sabotage to some extent.

Anyway, I’d love to hear anyone else’s stories. :slight_smile:

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I noticed the same problem for me when I started back in August 2023 alongside with Genki I and II. The end result was to completely stop learning Japanese by the end of the year due to being overwhelmed and frustrated.
So I did a restart on January 1st and committed to this journey (buying lifetime during sales) and changed how I approach new lessons. Luckily, WaniKani also changed their feature regarding that, so I can hold the number down on my dashboard to a reasonably 10 (tried it with 20 first, but 10 is currently better for me).

Now I reached Lvl 10 a few days ago, but only did the first half of Kanji because I really, really want to clear the vocab of Lvl 9 first (= getting it to Guru) plus the first unlocked Lvl 10 vocabs before I move on.
I no longer care how long I’ll spend on a level since I changed my mindset to not being in a race but more in a marathon - and only competing with myself. (Even though it’s always astonishing to read about others reaching Lvl 60 in a so-and-so short time, and my first and very brief thought is “I want that too!”. :see_no_evil:)
I also heavily use the lesson picker to choose vocabs with certain Kanji to learn them as a group - or to choose only radicals, etc. And I even don’t care anymore if I reach all 10 lessons or not with that tactic = if the day is for radicals and there are only 8 then so be it. :sunglasses:

Of course, I also have many scripts to work around the WaniKani vanilla limits (like double check for typos, etc). I’m so grateful that there’s a huge and active coding community here! :heart:

For now, that how it works best for me, and I’m sure I’ll do some changes again over the time, so I’ll stay flexible. :v:

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Oh wow. Welcome back, and congratulations on the milestone! :slight_smile:

I’ve definitely done better with a more measured approach, with WaniKani in particular, Japanese in general, and, well…a lot of things in life – I used to be way too much of an all-or-nothing person. Cheers! :grin:

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Without a doubt, I would say it is doing too many lessons too quickly.

Lessons are like fuel for a giant steam locomotive (汽車), and the giant locomotive is like your schedule for upcoming WK reviews. Adding lessons is like adding fuel to the furnace of the locomotive, which will steadily build up steam pressure after you add it. Steam pressure pushes the giant locomotive to go faster and faster, and the only (safe) way to reduce steam pressure is do your reviews!

But like a giant locomotive, it has a lot of mass/inertia. So, it takes some time between adding the fuel and seeing the train’s speed/momentum increase. At the beginning, it might seem like you can add lessons forever, and the train will never go very fast. But before you know it, the train is going pretty fast, and continuing to speed up! And – since having a lot of mass also means it takes a long time to slow back down – if you’re not careful and keep adding fuel to the furnace at the same rate, the train can easily start going way too fast.

And again, the only way to reduce the steam pressure is to do your reviews! So that means that lessons you added literally months ago can still be causing you to get overwhelmed with seemingly endless review after review. But the only way to reduce those reviews is to do them!

It can be a huge trap that can lead to one of the worst things: burn-out!

The solution (unless you’re actually trying to go as fast as possible; for which there are plenty of guides/posts on how to do that, and what it entails) is to manage your lessons before you start to get overwhelmed – long before you start heading towards burn-out.

Burn-out sucks, folks. I don’t recommend it on anyone!

The two simplest ways that work to manage lessons/fuel that I know of are:

  1. “Cruise Control; or, Steady IN, steady OUT”
    Always do the same, fixed number of lessons per day (or every other day, or week, or whatever), and occasionally adjust the number of lessons (usually down) to a level that you can sustain for a long time without having to endure overwhelm and/or burn-out.
    For example, maybe at the beginning you can do 15 lessons per day. But pretty soon, it may be wise to lower that to 10. And pretty soon after that, maybe down to 5. And even then, you may eventually need to lower it to something like 3 per day (or 5 every other day, or 5 per week, or whatever).
    Or, …
  2. “Keep Tabs on the Furnace; or, Only Add Fuel When Needed”
    Basically, you choose a certain ‘level’ that you’re comfortable with, in terms of the number of Apprentice items you have at any particular moment – say, 100 Apprentice items, to start off with. The Apprentice item count is a pretty good ‘gauge’ for reading the current ‘temperature’ of your ‘furnace’ (and to some extent also Gurus, but you can more or less focus on Apprentices if you want to keep it simple). Then, you simply wait until your Apprentice count is below your current threshold, and only then do new Lessons (e.g. 5 at a time).
    This method is less ‘steady’ than Cruise Control, but the advantage is that it is more flexible if you don’t have as regular or ideal of a daily schedule. If some days you can do all your Reviews, you may end up adding one or two batches of new Lessons. If on a regular day you just do your regular Reviews, you might not add any new Lessons, or maybe just one batch. But if, as is often the case for many folks, you have one or more days where you can only do a minimal number of reviews, then you may end up going several days – or even a week or more – before you get your Apprentices back below your chosen threshold. And therefore, you do not do any new Lessons for that period of time.
    As long as you maintain a daily habit of doing at least some reviews every single day – even if it’s as little as a single review – then you will continuously reduce that ‘steam pressure’, and you will eventually get your furnace back down to your preferred threshold level of, say, 100 Apprentices.
    Also, if 100 Apprentices still seems like too much, you can easily just lower that to 90, 80, 70, or whatever. I currently have mine at 60-70. Or, if 100 is too slow, up it to 150 or 200.

Regardless of which system you use, you can choose your own pace, and you do that by adjusting how much fuel/Lessons you add to your giant locomotive’s engine.

Adding too much fuel, too fast, can lead to a runaway locomotive (overwhelm and burnout), which is a nasty, nasty situation. Hence why I think it’s the biggest mistake when using WaniKani (or any SRS system, tbh).

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Loved the steam locomotive analogy. Cool.

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Thank you! :heart:
And I totally agree with your second part. In my eyes, it’s a sign of inner strength to be able to adjust the own mindset throughout life, since it requires the ability to acknowledge one did go a wrong path and has the willing to take actions to change something.

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For me it was definitely using WaniKani when I didn’t really have a need or a desire to learn kanji.

I started in 2017 about a year and half after my company had moved me to Japan to work out of the Tokyo office. I started wanting to learn Japanese and for whatever reason thought that I had to learn kanji while studying Japanese.

This lack of motivation combined with the difficulty of learning kanji was making me constantly stop doing my reviews and getting overwhelmed. It was also zapping my desire to learn Japanese at all.

The best thing I did was quit WaniKani and focus off my efforts on speaking and listening, which I’ve gotten pretty good at! So that’s pretty cool. It was more important for me to be able to converse with the people I was meeting in Japan.

Now I am back in Canada and I’ve been come back to WaniKani because now I want to learn kanji and have the motivation to do so. I am happy with the fact that I’ve gone just about 8 months now without missing a day.

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I’m always reminded of one of my favourite prog-rock songs, Locomotive Breath by the band Jethro Tull. “No! It don’t slow down!”.

Someone made a music video with the song set to the classic Buster Keaton silent film The General, for your entertainment :smile: :

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Ohh yeah… I didn’t happen to try that myself, but I can totally imagine that being a special kind of hell. Fortunately I didn’t even start looking into how I might study kanji until I actually got the urge to do so (I suspect it would have been different if I’d been living in Japan at the time though!) and fortunately found WaniKani pretty quickly. :laughing:

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Mesma coisa por aqui… comentário em português perdido no fórum haha
Também comecei a estudar pelo Wanikani de forma obsessiva, fazendo todas as lições disponíveis. De início, conseguia fazer as revisões. Após algumas semanas, as revisões aumentaram muito e eu demorava cerca de 40 minutos para terminar. Foi se tornando desgastante ver mais de 100 kanjis para revisar.

Ao mesmo tempo, acho que é uma das coisas mais agradáveis do método de aprendizado do site: você pode aprender mais rápido se o seu cérebro estiver em um dia mais produtivo, e colocar o pé no freio quando não está em um ritmo bom. Por isso sempre é necessário colocar na balança se não está dando um salto maior que as pernas e, quando necessário, deixar as lições paradas um pouco e continuar apenas revisando por alguns dias.

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Wtf did I just watch.

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Welcome to the forums, @karineguilherme !
I used Google Translate to understand your comment! :+1:

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The full movie (silent film) The General is actually really funny, in a very Buster Keaton way: He’s known as “The Great Stone Face”, for his comedic slapstick stunts while playing a comedic ‘straight man’ with a ‘deadpan’ expression; compare with say Charlie Chaplin, his more famous contemporary, who heavily uses facial expression in his own style of comedy.

For a modern day analog, you can actually think of Jackie Chan in many of his incredible martial-arts and stunt sequences, which often included somewhat-deadpan comedic elements. (Especially in his early movies.) Jackie Chan himself even names Buster Keaton as one of his inspirations.

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My strategy is to mantain between 75% - 85% of right answers. If I do it I will take new lessons, if I am around 70-75% or below I won´t take new lessons. I also try to do it three times a day. And try to use the notebook keyboard that I type faster without many missclicking.

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Olá Karine tudo bem? Vai fazer a prova de proficencia na lingua japonesa em Julho? De onde você é? Sou de sp capital

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WaniKani is interesting because…

  1. it’s a much more efficient and faster way to learn kanji compared to doing more of the “grunt work” yourself (“manually” researching, studying, setting up your own system, etc.) so all you really have to do is show up (and pay) and do the putting-stuff-in-your-brain part (which no one else can do for you), but…

  2. the longer you take learning kanji (or anything else, really) the more likely you are to retain it long-term, even through periods of disuse.

So there’s kind of this clash between competing factors, where we try to find some semblance of balance that works best for ourselves, since everyone is different. Fascinating. :nerd_face:

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I burnt out the same way a few years back doing WaniKani. I was initially doing as much lessons as I could for the first ten levels then transitioned to 20 per day til I burnt out.

On top of this, the biggest mistake I made was not immersing in Japanese i.e. reading. This convinced my brain that I only needed Japanese for WaniKani and that really brought my retention down to the point where I burnt out because I kept getting my reviews wrong and could never remember my lessons even if I did only 5.

I was stuck on level 31 for 516 days and 29 and 30 for 100 days each. I made it a point to still do reviews but I never did any lessons because I felt that I couldn’t remember any more words.

image

On a whim, I started playing SMT IV on my 3DS along with Yokai Watch 2 in Japanese just to see if I could do something else to “restart” from my burnout. To my surprise, I was able to actually play (with very generous dictionary usage) and comprehend most of the stuff in game. But my biggest rule here to myself was to just do 10 mins a day. No more no less. This took much of the weight/pressure off having to really be in that study mode because it was so short. And this proved to my brain that I could still learn even after burning out.

This in turn re-motivated me to tackle WaniKani in a more sustainable manner. If I did only 5 lessons a day during my burn out I would be level 60 by now. So with that in mind I went back to it starting at 5 lessons a day and worked my way up to 15.

This also happened to coincide with their own implementation of locking lessons to a set amount per day and to hide the total amount of lessons available. This was perfect for me because I always felt way too intimidated every level up to see another 100+ lessons available. The sense of accomplishment when you zeroed out your lessons never happened anymore because I couldn’t keep up. But with the new update, every day I get that sense of accomplishment that I’ve cleared out my lessons for the day.

I’m finding that 10 lessons a day is a sustainable thing to do everyday. I personally do 15 right now but that’s because I have more time in my day to spend for reviews. With 15 lessons a day for me and with reviewing at the start and end of my day, I average around 11 days per level. However I average around 100 reviews for my start of the day review and about 80 for the end of day review.

So now I’m on track with my pace to hit level 60 by the end of the year (hopefully).

Surprisingly, the thing that keeps my retention locked in for WaniKani isn’t WaniKani, it’s actually my daily immersion of reading and listening to Japanese. This tells my brain that the Japanese language is a priority and (probably) helps retention because my brain now allocates more resources towards retaining the words I learn in WaniKani.

It’s been said often that WaniKani is a supplement and not the main thing, I know that this is common knowledge amongst learners but I think because WaniKani is a very long journey, we tend to forget that there’s a whole world of Japanese outside of WaniKani. And with the amount of mental power WaniKani asks of you day in, day out, we tend to not want to interact with Japanese after WaniKani because of how mentally draining it is.

However, as the saying goes: “Use it or lose it”

And this means using it in the real world away from WaniKani. Even if I check the dictionary every other kanji, the effort I put in shows my brain that this is something that needs priority and therefore needs to be remembered outside of just WaniKani.

So personally the main thing that got me out of my burn out was the same reason I got started with Japanese: To be able to consume and enjoy their media at a native level. However the thing that keeps me going day to day sustainably is limiting my lessons to 15 a day and just doing it everyday whether I feel like I can remember or not simply because the SRS system will handle the remembering for my anyway.

EDIT: added a pic of my burnout and my “rebirth” Just to really illustrate my point.

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Por enquanto ainda não vou fazer, talvez a do final do ano. E você?
Sou do RS.
Bons estudos, companheiro brasileiro.

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++ While that must have been incredibly frustrating, it’s awesome that you found your groove. Great story either way, but I like this happy ending. :slight_smile:

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Your post made my day as currently I use WK exactly like that (activating everything when I get it and doing everything every single day for the last 143 days). To be honest when I started WK this Spartan way I had a feeling this one is a cold turkey approach, but I’m on level 12 and I still enjoy it. I do two big batches of reviews, one in the morning and one in the evening, also trying to keep my review count below 200 per day. It is a bit tough I have to admit, but in 3-4 weeks I start to burn items so hopefully the whole thing will stabilize. I also do SRS grammar on MaruMori, it’s fun I have to say. I try to squeeze this two into a 2x45 mins block every day which I can manage most of the time. Will see how it will look like in another 6 months time.

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