Coming back after 4 months

[pajo00]

During my time learning Japanese i started to lose interest for some reason and stopped learning any Japanese altogether. Now i find myself back hoping to maybe get back to where i was. I really enjoy the language but im just not sure where to start on wanikani, i have 350+ reviews but i feel like i need to go over the basics again but im not sure how to go about it

[insu]

[novakac]

I had a similar break, just further along in my journey. I was already level 35 and had 2000 burns. So after four months, I reset to level one and started over. I finally got back to level 35 a couple weeks ago. Here’s my notes:

Pros: Nice review of all the kanji. Things went faster, I got fewer incorrect. It took up less of my day than it did the first time due to fewer and easier review queues.

Cons: It took a long long time to get back to level 35 and learn new stuff. During this long time, I sort of slacked off since it was all review, and didn’t do any Japanese study OTHER than wanikani. (Well, almost no other study). It became just a little thing a did a bit each day rather than the obsessive passion it had been the first time around.

If you don’t have any burns yet, I’d advise against resetting. Just let your misses filter back into your review stack, and review them after each miss. SRS will work it’s magic. I’d also advise to clear your review stack to zero as soon as humanly possible (even if it means guessing “bird” for each and every item) so that you’re reviewing things at 4 and 8 hour intervals again.

Hope you stick around this time!

[Rowena]

You don’t need to do anything in particular - that’s what the SRS is for; any items you don’t remember will come back more frequently until you learn them.

Don’t do any lessons until your reviews are under control, and don’t do reviews in larger batches than you will be able to handle when they come back in future reviews.

Welcome back and all the best. 頑張ってね！

PS I have reset and strongly counsel against it.

[tombo]

About to hit level ten after resetting after a year+ absence. I also think I wouldn’t reset in your case. And if you did maybe just reset back to 7 if you find that’s all lost to you. Do you remember the radicals tree, legs, cliff, horns? Probably. I bet you might remember 本、日、五、肉、maybe 学、生、学、生、中、国？ Perhaps vocab like 左手、見る、白い. Having to redo a lot of that might feel tedious. I’d give it a few days of reviews, if you find it miserable, then reset a few levels and repeat. Just remember that the accuracy hit is to be expected, not dreaded.

[KyokaJiro]

@pajo00

[slerched]

Whatever you do, do NOT drop back any levels. Don’t do it.

At least, don’t do it right now. Go through the 350 reviews you have in the pile. See what you remember. You are likely to be surprised at how much you remember.

Don’t do new lessons. Give that a few days, or a week or 2. Just focus on the reviews.

After you spend a week or 2 getting re-acclimated to the process, if you feel like some of the kanji just aren’t sticking, drop ONE level. Don’t dump all the way back to 1. See what you know/remember. If it’s still too hard, one more level. Keep doing that until it’s reasonable and manageable for you.

Don’t give up. Never surrender!

[Jerred]

If you take a little extra time with the reviews, you can read the mnemonics again after answering (whether you get the answer wrong, or even if you feel like you “guessed right”). Stuff that you didn’t know will drop down SRS levels and keep getting brought back to you, and if you feel like you don’t know something, that review will be your lesson! So if you work through those reviews, the system will just figure out what you know and what you don’t. Then you can start getting to new lessons again when the number of apprentice items starts to go down. (Side note: I did reset, and am on level three now, but that’s because I took, like, 18 months and didn’t remember ANYTHING, if I did know this stuff, I’d be so bored right now…)

[kusuri]

I’ve been here before too! I actually just got started again a month ago after a year break. I had 600+ reviews. I got them back down to zero and just recently leveled up twice. So you can do this too!

Here’s my advice - Don’t start over. You will remember more than you think. Take your reviews slowly. Just do enough each day to bring the number down by 50 reviews by the end of the day. (So if you have 350, you do 100, and get down to 250, by the end of the day maybe you get 50 reviews tagged on, so by the end of the day you’re at 300. Perfect.)

Doing them slowly will help your brain, you’ll get more right, and you also won’t be hating yourself later on when trying to review the giant chunk you did all at once, weeks from now.

Good luck! It’ll be easier than you think.

[pragmata]

Welcome back

[tombo]

@Jerred

If you take a little extra time with the reviews, you can read the mnemonics again after answering (whether you get the answer wrong, or even if you feel like you “guessed right”). Stuff that you didn’t know will drop down SRS levels and keep getting brought back to you, and if you feel like you don’t know something, that review will be your lesson!

Great approach! That’s actionable, simple, and targets the heart of the issue.

[Lamster]

Back after a few months and I have 2000 reviews to do.
Thankfully most are kanji in the “enlightened” stage and I remember most of them, but it’s still a lot. It sucks getting things wrong so often, when I used to get almost everything right, but that’s what learning is like.