I have nearly 4500 burnt items, but when I do some burnt items reviews from extra studies my accuracy percentages are extremely low (I get maybe 30% correctly). This is very depressing, because while I do my regular lessons and reviews, my accuracy is averaging on 96.33%, if wkstats is to be beleived, and also because I feel like I am making progress with wanikani levels, but it doesn’t help if I forget everything afterward.
Is there an easy way to resurrect each burnt item I get wrong, that does not include specifically searching that item on wanikani and resurrecting it mannually? Maybe there’s a userscript for that? I don’t want to reset but I really need to take a break from new vocabulary and focus on the burnt items I apparently don’t remember at all
Burning items in my opinion is the biggest trap of the WaniKani program and it’s completely misleading. Forgetting things and needing to look them up again is a perfectly normal part of the learning process. Just because an item is burnt, it doesn’t mean that it’s actually burnt, especially if months or years go by without ever seeing that item again.
Immersion is where everything will slowly sort itself out. Reading, listening, speaking, etc. is going to reinforce these items better than Wanikani ever can.
Try not to be too discouraged or depressed. All of the work that you have done up to now has been valuable and it has prepared you for many things that you might not have been able to do before.
Like Simias said, start reading or do more of it if you’ve already begun. You will be constantly reviewing items this way and remembering the ones that are actually used often in the language. Maybe the 30% that you are getting correct are actually the most common items you will encounter in the language and the other 70% are more situational.
You’ve done great up to now and you’ve made it far! You are propably more than prepared for the most exciting part, which is to start reading more and watching more things that you love and enjoy!
I see that, it’s important to expect to use a dictionary for while. What happens after having learnt thousands of vocab and Kanji is that, old items and also new items, can be remembered more easily.
Whether you see or don’t see Kanji repeated in real life also depends on what you are reading. It can also mean a mental barrier away from reading a harder material. Though, this depends on more than difficulty, like storyline, genre, social, and mental state (e.g. concentration).
Read easier things and what you are driven to read for now. Read harder stuff later.
If you want to revise old WaniKani items, you can use Self Study Script, up from Level 1. But then, I wouldn’t expect much from WaniKani; like lack of easier Kanji, and too many of rarer vocab while missing immediately useful ones, in lower levels.
You can also gradually migrate to Anki+Yomitan or Kitsun if you believe in SRS and immersion. I don’t really think everything need to be put in SRS, though. Having a better memory, sure; but mid-term or long-term forgetting is not a bad thing for things that don’t matter.
I don’t know about WK userscripts, but I do something like that with JPDB+JPDBreader. While reading any webpage, or a book in ttsu, JPDBReader provides a popup where I can mark the word as failed (or as reviewed), and JPDB SRS adjusts accordingly.
So even though this is a non-answer, you could graduate from WK, leave burned items burned, and use another tool for that extra study. Be it JPDB, Anki mining, or anything else.
I agree and generally “mining” content for your own cards is the best way to go once you have the ultra-basics covered with tools like WaniKani and other pre-made decks.
I have a bunch of words in my Anki deck that I first encountered in WaniKani but decided to study again when I found them in something that I read. Some of my WaniKani leeches in particular become vastly easier to remember if I can link them to a meaningful scene in a book, manga or videogame for instance.
I remember really struggling with 都合 in WaniKani because the reading is a bit unexpected and the meaning quite abstract but then I encountered it in a game I played and simply having a concrete, meaningful context for the word immediately made it click for me and I never forgot it after that.
Adding a bit of JPDB and Anki into my routine while consuming as much content as I could in my spare time made Wanikani a million times easier. Never worried about revisiting burned items, because if they’re important and I don’t remember somehow, I’ll just look them up again, and they stick even better. It’s the same as having reviewed it on here, but with the benefit of context which you can also “mine” like simias mentioned. Using ASBPlayer, you can export audio sentence cards instantly so it makes the process pain free. JPDB is great as a pure vocab SRS to add words from reading, to complement Wanikani, and to continue once you’re all done here. Also, you’ll often find while reading you’ll remember the exact readings of burned items that you “forgot”, and even know the readings of new vocab ahead of time, even if you forgot a particular kanji. It’s still stored in your brain somewhere.
this happens with a lot of things I’ve studied before. I think the better approach could be read more or maybe create an anki deck and add everything you get wrong while doing your reviews! it could be helpful, maybe.
Burned doesn’t actually mean you’ve “permanently memorized” it, but rather than you have sufficiently learned it so if you need to look it up, it’s easily refreshed in your brain. I’m seeing this with the initial burned reviews I got wrong, in that I don’t get them wrong a second time even after another four months have passed.
It’s okay to have to look something up every once in a while, it’ll be back in your brain, much different than a kanji you’ve never seen before. Every time you read a word you’re refreshing what that word means. As others have said, by reading and immersion you’ll be constantly refreshing the meanings of words.