I really like the extra study options that were added recently. It’s great to have something to do when I’m in the mood for crunching some kanji but my ‘Reviews’ & ‘Lessons’ queues are already cleared out.
How about adding a ‘Review Burned Items’ option?
My pace has slowed a little recently, and I’m sure that some of the stuff that I have burned has unburned itself in the interim. It would be really nice to have the option to just crunch through some of that when the mood takes me.
I think it would be more useful than the current ‘Recent Lessons’ & ‘Recent Mistakes’ options. Both of those (I feel) interfere with the whole philosophy of SRS. The spacing is designed to maximize memorization, and it messes with the spacing.
It would be amazing if you tracked how many times items have been reviewed post burn, and pushed less reviewed items up in the queue. But I’d settle for just completely random items from my burned list to churn through at my leisure.
I’m not sure if WaniKani has changed their stance regarding reviews beyond the burned stage – it always seemed to me that they want to push you away from the SRS towards reading practice at this point. But I would still like a native “Burned Items” extra study mode.
In the meantime, there is the option of using the “Self Study” mode provided by the Reorder Omega userscript with the “100 Random Burned Items” preset.
it’s interesting idea but in the end it may lead you to never get out of the comfort zone.
the idea of burned is that you can approach other media like book, manga or anime with JP subtitles (what I am doing now) and I use that as a way to remember those almost forgotten burned itens in my mind.
But for me, knocking out some wanikani and reading a book are completely different activities. Wanikani I can do any time and in short bursts. Reading a book is something I usually dedicate an hour to. And if people want to stay in their comfort zone, why not let them!
I think it makes more sense as an extra study option than the current reviews of mistakes and new items, at least reviewing burned items doesn’t mess with the SRS process.
It’s been said in other ways, but the idea of “burned” items is if you aren’t seeing them “in the wild” in a year then all that time you spent learning it is kind of useless. So I recommend just trying reading. You’ll surely run into those kanji that way if your serious. Otherwise the reviewing burned items feels like your only learning Kanji for WaniKani and no other purpose outside of that.
I made that mistake in my first year using the site and dedicated my free time to WK. After a year I realized I didn’t really learn japanese at all. The next 2 years I spent learning grammar and reading books, watching shows, etc. WK is just a supplement for Kanji learning alongside actually reading and enjoying the language. Which is easy to forget.
I think above everything else people need to remember just how long of an endeavour Wani Kani is. I could get to Level 40 in the next calendar year, but then unforseen circumstances could force me to have to step away from learning jp for, lets say, 6 months. Having a dedicated ‘burned items’ deck when I come back would be an enourmous benefit. I do appreciate the fact that we now have the option to review burned items, but I would like to see WK down the line give us an option to build custom decks.
