Hello. I’ve had WaniKani for just over a year now and the first 6 months or so were really good. I was doing lessons and reveiews, and I wouldn’t flounder if I got critical condition items as I knew I could always bring them back up with time. That was all true until the Summer.
I’m a student so I went out to get a job once Summer started. I went from being able to find 5-10 minutes each hour of the day to do reviews and/or lessons to not being able to do anything for 8+ hours and a giant stack of reviews awaiting me when I got home in the evening. Call this a bad excuse all you want, but this was where I started cheating.
I noticed pretty quickly that the amount of reviews would make me panic and try to get through it as quickly as possible. This, of course, led to many mistakes. After noticing this, I got an evil thought: “Since I’m only making mistakes because of the amount of reviews, it shouldn’t hurt to cheat, right?”
From that point on, I was a cheater. Even after school started back up I continued to use the cheating ways despite no reason to do so. Mind you, This was around the level 12 mark and I’m going to be resetting my progress at level 27. More than half of my time on WaniKani was just me cheating the system. I didn’t see any negative consequences of this until the first batches of burned items started to show up. But that never was a problem because I could just cheat my way through that too. Of the 1,583 items that are burned, I probably only know 1/4 of them.
Now we’re here. I wasted not only my money and time on cheating, but I have to do it all over again. My advice to anyone who’s cheating: don’t be like me.
Cheating the system is just cheating yourself. Congratulations on coming to that realization and being willing to invest in yourself again.
That being said, there are certain points when I don’t mind “cheating”. Honest typos, fundamentally similar meanings where I’ve just forgotten the keywords, etc.
Ultimately it comes down to what you want to get out of the program. For me it’s not the cool gold badge that matters, it’s my understanding and progress as I learn a new language.
agree with what @Tenugui said: well done for coming to this realization and being honest with yourself; you may feel you wasted time/money, but better now than had you continued cheating all the way up to level 60.
I don’t think it’s a bad excuse at all but a very genuine difficulty that lots of people face. Doing wanikani, and studying japanese (or any language) more widely, is a long-term life commitment and so it’s always likely that within this period, life circumstance will change and the amount of hours or times available you have to study in a day will fluctuate etc. I think one of the best things about the long-term nature of language learning is that it forces you to be adaptable and change how you study depending on the changes in one’s life situation. To be able to adapt the method all the while maintaining being true to yourself and having genuine learning at the heart of it all, because ultimately that’s in your best interest as you know.
Hopefully this can be a great learning opportunity moving forward there are lots of wanikani forums on how to deal with these kind of feelings:
you’re not at all alone so feel free to reach out good luck going forward!
there are lots of wanikani forums on how to deal with these kind of feelings:
good luck going forward!