So, I’ve been using WaniKani for several years now, and have made it to level 32. In the time I’ve been doing this I’ve accumulated over 3000 burned items, but I have not been regularly reviewing them. I suppose I got into a mindset of ‘just keep moving forward’ and didn’t think too hard about it. Every once in a while if I had free time I would do a burned items extra study, but it has never been a regular thing. This has all come to a head now because I’m trying to redouble my efforts, as I’m hoping to take the JLPT this year. When I went to try to work my way through all my burned items, I found that I was getting a lot of them wrong. A sizeable amount I had just outright forgotten, and many more I only half remembered. This has me really worried. I’m not really sure what I should do. I don’t want to feel like all the studying I’ve done has been for nothing.
Anki.
Unless the word is super common that you always see it, if you never review or use it it eventually it’ll be forgotten.
So the middle levels are tough that way - there are too many to keep reviewing, but it’s not quite enough to read a newspaper. See nobody expects getting an item to burned to be memorized for life. It gets it to “good enough” so getting reminded of it every time you randomly see it in real life is enough to maintain the memory. But that assumes you are actually reading Japanese in real life.
Which seques into my recommendation: forget about reviewing burned items and just read. Graded readers, NHK easy, even pick your way through the real newspaper. It’s frustrating and tedious at first but gets easier. And hey, if you never see a kanji or vocabulary word in real life, maybe it’s ok to forget that one and have to look it up on the rare occasion you run into it.
Have you started reading content yet?
Because, while there are a few exceptions here and there, the large majority of the vocab you’ve encountered by level 32 should show up in native content at some point. (This is especially true if you read prose such as novels or news articles, as opposed to something like manga which is heavily favored to dialogue).
You shouldn’t need to have to forcibly review them if you’re engaging in content regularly. Your brain will relearn them faster since there’s probably still some remnants of knowledge in there, so exposure should be enough. But if not, then you could forcibly review them.
They are somewhere in your memory in the long term unused data, you need to re-activate them periodically by reading. At such a high level you should be having a lot of fun reading that it should be difficult if not impossible to forget them.
It is time to start collecting on the fun you have already paid for.