Hey folks. Here for advice and (perhaps) encouragement??? Before you explain that the SRS is the point, let me explain my header.
I’ve been doing WK on and off for about 3 years. I’ve taken some significant breaks in that period (like, close to 6mo at one point) but I move pretty slow even so. In that time I’ve done several intensive language courses and been to Japan, and I don’t deny that WK has been VERY helpful to my language learning.
I have a diagnosed learning disability that seriously affects memory and processing speed. I take an exceptionally long time to remember facts/definitions/isolated information/translations even with memory devices like mnemonics. Because of my terrible memory I regularly get 50% or less on my reviews, and because of my superbly slow speed in accessing any kind of memory (correct or incorrect), I often spend 3+ hours per day trying to clear my WK stack. My slow speed paired with my consistently wrong answers just compounds this problem, and adds cards I still don’t know to my review stack. I am honestly feeling completely demoralized. I can’t keep up with the SRS, I keep getting fed cards that I have no prayer of knowing, and having piles and piles of reviews gives me extreme anxiety (cried my way through 2 hours of reviews yesterday before putting myself back on vacation mode and watching YouTube nature walks to calm down. Didn’t finish what was in the stack, either.). I don’t have the time or the emotional energy for this (I have a job!!!), but WK itself has been really helpful to my language learning overall. If I’m being honest, though, I’ve made it this far because I’ve devoted WAY more time and energy to it than is reasonable, and I just don’t have that time or energy anymore.
TL;DR Learning disability and disability-induced anxiety causing me to fall irredeemably behind and I need options.
Anyway, I have two questions:
1) Is there any way to either turn off the SRS or slow it down? I can’t keep up with it as it is and if I just let the cards pile up to save myself time, then I’ll be trying to review cards I don’t know very well waaaaaay after I was supposed to, getting them wrong, and compounding the problem. I want to keep learning, but I can’t handle the SRS as it is, and it’s causing me. Extreme. Anxiety (yay!!! LD-related trauma!!)
2) How have other WK users handled learning disabilities + WK? My specific issues are memory and speed-related, plus a really hard time pairing specific English definitions with kanji. I know the meaning of the kanji, but when asked to translate my knowledge of English deserts me (and I have an excellent vocabulary).
If you made it to the end of this long post, I would appreciate any insight you have on anything I mentioned. Thank you!!