I know a lot of people who post have the aim to finish as soon as possible, but honestly I’m not concerned about speed so much as how well I feel like I know the material I’m learning. Sometimes I “burn” items that I feel like I don’t really know that well and I think that I’ll probably forget them soon. So I usually end up unburning one out of 5 items that I burn.
Does anyone else do this or is it just me? I feel like everyone else that posts here is just concerned with how fast they can complete each level.
I do it sometimes when I accidentally get something right with the wrong nuance. I usually check the meaning section again just in case. For example, if a translation of something is “to view”, and I’ve always assumed it was about “physical viewing something” while it was actually about “to look at something from a point of view”, then I’d unburn that item.
Also, sometimes I go through my recently burned list, and if I’m all of a sudden like “wait what is this even”, then I might consider unburning it.
In general though, I do it pretty rarely and mostly in extreme cases like the first situation.
Keep in mind though, the unburning item will suddenly be at the front of your mind, so the act of unburning makes you know the item inside out.
To add to this, I do not unburn magic items. Sometimes I just go by my gut feeling about a kanji and am correct about it. I attribute this to ingrained knowledge rather than to luck, as some others do.
I do burned item reviews, and if I make a mistake I resurrect it.
I’m not sure I see the connection you’re implying.
If people focus on leveling up quickly (which is a perfectly valid approach to take), unburning things won’t really have any impact on that. Leveling is affected by getting things to guru.
If you just felt like getting a jab in at team fast, just ignore me.
I’ve never unburned anything. I can see why one might want to, but for me I’d rather get through the material and learn most of the kanji reasonably well before worrying about addressing the ones I’m a little weak at.
As people have said, unburning doesn’t actually decrease your potential levelling speed, but it would certainly add to your workload.
It’s not that I’m trying to race to 60 or anything (I’m in fact getting dangerously close to having been on level 40 for a year). I just don’t think it’s worth stressing over being 100% confident of every single thing I burn. Even if I’m confident at the time, I’m sure I’ll forget some of them anyway because they might not get any reinforcement from reading. I’d rather work my way through them all and then return at the end to do some remedial work.
You really think it doesn’t matter? Actual question, I really am unsure. I know I say I don’t care about how fast I go, but it really would feel better to know that I’m not slowing myself down any haha.
I mean… are you asking about how leveling up works? Once a radical or kanji item gets to guru, its role in being related to leveling up ends. If you then burn it and unburn it, it will not affect your level speed in any way. Vocab items never affect level speed at any point.
Your original post seemed to imply that people who want to level up at a rapid pace don’t care about how well they understand the content, which is why I referred to it as a jab, since it’s not true.
Back when I was leveling up close to max speed the first time, I usually had the next level’s items in a non-WaniKani review process so that when I did the lessons for the first time, I wasn’t actually seeing the content for the first time. This allowed me to do the lessons quickly, but doesn’t really align with the idea that I wasn’t trying to learn the content.
After reaching level 60, I started to resurrect every kanji or words I encountered in native material that I couldn’t remember. Very often, they are actually from lower levels, stuff that I burned more than one year ago.
So far it seems to be very beneficial. The second run is smooth and I have a much better grasp at the context in which the word was used.
(I remember one in particular, 仕草. Because it’s level 5, I burned it way too soon so too speak. It’s a very common word, but not used in material for beginner, so it took me one or two a years before I encountered it for the first time outside of WK. Also the primary definition given by WK “action” is unfortunately kinda terrible, too abstract…)
This is my approach, too. This means I focus is on how well I recall in context.
Funnily enough, this has also been exposing holes in WaniKani, where I assume I had forgotten something, but it wasn’t taught. Example from this week: 岸 as a vocabulary. I knew the meaning, but didn’t know the 訓読み, きし. I tried to look it up and only found the kanji entry.
