there’s some studies about the formation of memories and how long they last. i used to look into this when i embarked on my japanese journey, but that’s a few years in the past.
maybe check TED, they have some interesting talks, and i think TED Ed has an explanatory video.
I don’t see why you can’t combine both approaches. Give yourself 30 seconds or however long to think about the answer on your own, but if you don’t come up with it in 3 seconds purposely fail it by typing the wrong thing.
This here is a pretty good article that explains why “losing” is so painful, and what price you pay for it.
Go fast, be reckless and stubborn. Just keep on trucking.
Thanks for the link! I’ve read about similar studies. I’m not worried about “losing” (consciously, at least!), I just wonder what’s the “best” method for me in the long run.
WK is just a small piece of the puzzle, it’s not even really a long term commitment. After level 60 there is not really a benefit for me in just burning everything. I just unburned all kanji to see the “old ones” together with others, because the kanji that could be confused often don’t appear together.
For really “knowing” a kanji I think that the question is not if you see it 8 times or 10 times per year, but rather 8 times or 50/100 times.
Yep, no disagreement there! 
But, and I might be missing something here, I come back to my point about not being able to read much when you’re only at level 2x. People say that you can read text with furigana, but reading whilst having to look up the meaning of a large proportion of the text doesn’t seem like much fun. It also plays into the time-balance discussion, i.e. extra time taken trying to read text while looking up large portions of the text is time not spent learning kanji/vocab/grammar.
So for that period between when you start burning kanji/words, but before you can comfortably read reasonable chunks of text, a way to not burn items would be beneficial. As the posters above said, I can just deliberately get those answers wrong, hoping that I don’t miss any out. But it seems like a simple addition to the burn dialogue along the lines of “Return to Master / Enlightened?” would be very useful for some of us. I wonder if that’s something that can be scripted.
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You have to look up lots of stuff with level 60 as well, knowing the kanji is only half the way (probably much less). Reading is mainly recognizing what you read before, not just knowing all the words. I am currently reading a grammar book for middle schoolers, in the beginning I read maybe half a page or less, now I can read a few pages without completely burning out (after like 150 pages). The writing is repetitive, once you get the pattern it gets easier (the words repeat as well). No matter what you do, reading will never be fun in the beginning 
I don’t think you can unburn anything to other than Apprentice 1 with scripts, the levels of the items are handled on the server. You’ll have to hope that they implement unburning to other levels.
I would wish for bringing any items back to Apprentice 1 on batch, repeating items that are freshly enlightened is not really supported. For me bringing items I already know back to master is not a huge deal.
Fair enough… I guess the point is, I (we) just have to bite the bullet and start reading at some stage, and the sooner the better(?).
Thanks for the replies everyone.
At least “With level 60 it doesn’t get any better”
I was waiting for a higher level to start reading because looking up kanji was taking away mental capacity away from concentrating on the text, but the real problem is the vocab side, there are many words I don’t know with the first 1000 kanji already …
With level 44 you know 95% of the middle school kanji already, that should be enough for zero worries from the kanji side for lots of reading materials.
With level 24 you can graduate from the third grade already 
The challenge is to find the right material, but the third graders are already reading books as well.
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