I just got my “Congrats!” message for getting to Level 6 (yay!) and part of it says something about what happens after Level 10. It says this, “That’s about when you start burning things. That means some items will leave your review pile.” What’s that mean exactly?
I’d want to be able to review those stuff even after they end up in the burned pile because I could still forget them. Or is WaniKani completely confident about everything and mean to say that those stuff are really burned in your brain you don’t gotta worry about them anymore?
After you have burned an item you will not see it again. The philosophy here is that you will know it well enough that just reading native material is enough to keep your memory fresh
Once burned they will leave your review queue forever.
However you can get some plugins (Self-Study Quiz) to review them specifically. Alternatively you can fail some items on purpose if you feel like you would like to practice them more. Generally speaking, if you can easily burn an item, it means you’re really quite done with it. As in they should stick with you for a good while, though there are exceptions.
Well, their definition of burned into your brain is that you remember enough about the item to recall it after a long period of time.
It’s like the English words you learn as part of a vocab list in grade school. You probably know them enough to pass the test at the end of the year, but they’ll fade as you get older. If you run across them again, you should remember enough to be able to glean the context, or you look it up and move on.
There’s also an option to ‘unburn’ a burned item. When I encounter an item when reading that I don’t remember anymore I just unburn it and it moves to the review queue.