I’ve really hit a wall. The reviews are adding up with over 200 in my queue and I can’t seem to clear them. I’ve been at the current level for many weeks now. Trying to find the motivation to push through. Any tips?
stop new lessons, then work out your apprentices. maybe make drill decks in anki or quizlet, or make some on memrise.
just one of the problem kanji and related vocab, one deck for each, then the problem will go away after a few days and you can restart your progress. that’s way faster than hoping that the wk srs will solve the problem.
it’s important that you really focus on those kanji one by one. better 20 small decks you can run through on the toilet than one huge one that takes forever to do, that would turn you off.
the kanji and 5 words or so are easy going. also, really look at those things.
1 Like
Have you been bringing your reviews down to 0 at least once per day?
2 Likes
Nope, that’s the problem. Finally, today, I brought them to zero. It took me a couple of hours.
Also, I need to improve my retention with the abstract words. I’m terrible with those.
2 Likes
I might try that that. Focusing on some of the leech kanji and improve my retention. I think that’s where my problem is - it’s disheartening to keep forgetting the same abstract compounds over and over. Meanwhile, the reviews still add up!
2 Likes
Same here! I’m only on level 2 but I’ve learned more kanji than In a year of Japanese class at the university. Stoked.
2 Likes
I couldn’t access the platform for the past two days but today I cleared the reviews to zero. I only had around 60 but if I do this during the later levels will the number of reviews get unbearable after 2 days of no activity?
60 reviews for level 2 seemed like a lot…So I imagine the upper levels give you more reviews…
1 Like
Oh, and if you’re thinking about grabbing a lifetime membership, keep your eyes out for our Winter Sale, which will be starting sometime in December.
Cheers!
—
Cyrus @ Tofugu
Sale confirmed. This is from an email I received from the team a few days ago.
1 Like
Nice profile picture 
1 Like
This will be a very smart move. You can also, in the Wanikani settings, choose to order your lessons by level and then material instead of a big shuffle. This way, you do the radicals and kanji first so your leveling up does not lag too much. Personally, I only stop doing lessons for radicals and kanji when my number of apprentice items exceed the 150 threshold. In this case, I do lots of leech training (with Apprentice 4 and Guru 1 items) with the self-quiz script and then the number of apprentice items drops fast in the next days.
1 Like
Well, you do learn over 8000 items by the end of WK, but the review workload does stabilize once you start burning items. A short break of one or two days can really vary depending on where items are in the SRS, especially how many are in apprentice; I’d guess that 300+ would be pretty normal at higher levels. A week vacation can easily bring 500+ reviews. I’ve taken multiple months off before and the highest it got (after reaching level 60) was approx. 750 reviews.
If you’re going to be gone that long, you might want to consider turning on vacation mode. (I don’t remember ever using it myself though)
1 Like
I had purchased a yearly subscription and was making progress with a reasonable tempo until I started losing discipline (and motivation) towards the end, which I attributed to “extensive workload in school” at the time. Only now do I realise that it was literally nothing compared to what I’m currently going through, but that cannot reverse my not having renewed the subscription when it expired with my being on level 18 and thereby halting virtually all my Japanese undertakings.
Three long years have passed since and the other day (it must have been around a month ago) I got exceedingly mad at myself for having let go of so much Japanese knowledge, which I had put numerous tedious hours in, so quickly without realising what a disservice I’ve done to myself in the long run. I’ve been considering resubscribing in the past few weeks, but I’ve been thinking way too much about how much (if even) I should reset, how to tackle the reviews etc. instead of just going for it.
Doing the reviews is the single best thing you can do for yourself in the long run as for most people (if you’re not one of those, then my kudos to you) seeing that number blow up to ludicrous heights will make you lose motivation quickly and steadily. Lessons, while not that important to stay on top of per se, are the thing that is going to propel you forwards and not doing them will cause you to stagnate unless you supplement your study with other resources.
2 Likes
resub, no reset. do the complete bunch. then check at which level your retention starts to deteriorate and make a cut there.
if you can somehow salvage the first few levels, you’ll save yourself the pain of doing all the days, numbers and stuff again - those are the worst part of WK and would drive me totally nuts. they might also be the reason so many newbies quit - you get hung up on these shitty items and the sense of progress is lackluster.
if you can make it to lvl 8ish, you’re good.
4 Likes
Not really. I mean I do bulk reviews, every morning I do ~150 reviews. And when I get lessons I do them all at once. It just depends on which method works better for your schedule.
Those turtles are not gonna burn themselves!
1 Like
I cheat by looking up the vocab words I know I will never use in the dictionary when doing my reviews.
1 Like
The baseball terms look like something you don’t need at first, but if you live in Japan, they use lots of them to describe everyday situations too.
I never stopped since I began last year, although when I got expelled from civilization when I went on a pilgrimage for one week in Ki peninsula and when I went to volunteer to an organic farm in Okinawa (the comeback at those times was harsh because there were tons of reviews) but on a daily baisis I always come back and to the thing at least twice a day.
You should focus on way to enjoy the reviews, don’t see it as homework, play it like a game! I’m aiming for the max level! (hopefully this is not disgaea)
2 Likes
I’m stopping my lessons for the time being until I can control my apprentice list which is ~300. I spent my Black Friday doing +700 reviews after a slacked week due to work/holiday (luckily it had a bunch of easy burns). Someone recommended keeping the apprentice list in the ~150 range which sounds like a reasonable goal until pushing forward again.
1 Like
that can be really tricky… there’re lots of vocab in WK that are all too related to japanese culture / routine (and not common at all in a western country) … train station terms, baseball, police / public office and religion related terms come to mind… But then again they come ever so often if you live in Japan or start reading or watching shows related to japan 
…
What kind of vocab are you excluding from reviews if I may ask?