Currently in the process of burning a lot of kanji and vocab with varying degrees of success. A lot of the times, especially when it comes to vocab, I get it right off the bat without even thinking much. The kanji themselves can be a little tough sometimes especially with visually similar ones. But the real problem I have are those kanji and vocab questions I kind of can recall and with a bit of deliberation can get to the answer.
Latest example was the vocab for 夫 read as おっと. I easily recognized the onyomi as ふ from 夫婦, but since this was an irregular reading it took me several minutes to recall it.
What would you do in this case when it’s about to be marked as burned? Would you mark it as wrong since the goal is fluency or do you chalk it off to lack of reading practice? The point of SRS to some degree is to ask you just when you are about to forget the learned material, but for me WaniKani is supposed to not just teach you Kanji, but become more fluent at reading.
I know WaniKani itself isn’t enough to achieve that and I have started reading proper texts and news at around level 20 to compliment the things I have learned here.
I think in the future I will be a bit more strict with myself and mark these as wrong. If the goal is to be able to read texts then I can’t let myself get hung up like that when actually trying to read. It would only lead to frustration. For me it’s not about passing the JLPT, but to actually have strong reading skills.
The latter, 100%. WaniKani is here to bootstrap your knowledge in order to bring you to a point where you can engage with the language proper, not bring you to fluency. Words like 夫 are going to come back again and again in the things you read and listen to, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to perfect it.
Don’t waste your time artificially inflating your number of WaniKani reviews when you could use that time reading Japanese instead. It’s going to be a lot easier to remember words when you read or hear then in meaningful context.
I think it’s very commendable that you’re trying to be strict with yourself on whether or not you properly remembered, but I agree with @simias. Especially about not needlessly inflating SRS reviews while consumption of native content is the goal.
If later down the road you decide that your retention of that word is lacking, you can go back to WK and unburn the items that you’re struggling with (especially since you’re a lifetime member). That way you’re re-doing items that are a problem during practical use, which is the most important benchmark, in my opinion.
How long does it take you to do 100 reviews if you spend minutes on some of them? I think you are spending way too much time trying to remember it. Give it 10-30 seconds and if you cannot remember, mark it as fail, and read the answer. More reviews is not a problem if you go through them faster. If you need minutes to recall something, than you don’t really remember it. Are you going to spend minutes per word when reading? Of course not.
I agree that trying to remember for more than say 15-30 seconds is probably taking too much time over one review. But for the general point, I would go ahead and mark this kind of thing correct. Separately, you want a mechanism where while you’re reading you can pick up new words and forgotten words and put them into a queue for learning or relearning. If you run into 夫 in the wild with furigana, that will probably help with reinforcing your memory of it. If you run into it without furigana and you remember the reading, then you just got a free review without having to unburn it. If you run into it without furigana, can’t remember the reading and it bothers you enough, it goes into the queue to add to SRS along with any other new words you found that seem worth learning.