Honestly, though… those same feelings, and I guess even little, like @aliciaogawa who wrote above who lives in Japan (max immersion) ) Alice, your experience did make me feel so much better, actually)… it’s simply difficult to become intimately familiar with 8000 words equally and intensely and functionally…
I don’t care too much about accuracy, but oh boy when I’ve been away for even a week, I come back to 60% and below… particularly the newer Vocab. I don’t sweat it, because it obviously means that I need to spend more time with those I missed. (sometime here says if they don’t have fast, certain recall, they miss it…I like that approach, so percents be d@mned, if I need it to come around again, I type “miss” or き).
I’m on a discord server and they started a game where people had to make Vocabulary cards. On PAPER! I was kind of ticked off, because I haven’t really used paper much in the last 2 years. One of the challenges was to write the same kanji 10 times on the Japanese school-kid paper grids. I could feel my relationship to the Kanji evolving as I wrote! And it reminded me of how it felt, copying sentences out of manga and novels to write notes. Goodness that takes SO LONG! WaniKani is like 140 vocabulary words per level. there is no way I’m going to handwrite all of that out!
Anyway… I can’t expect to know these well, I just want to get through WK…I realize that it’s only recognition and not recall… but I keep learning a bunch of these better as time goes by. I do Duolingo every day and that drills a lot of WaniKani vocabulary. I didn’t start WaniKani until after 2 years of DuoLingo, so about half of every level is already familiar to me.
I agree that multiple short sessions seem to give me better review rates and also better results multiple days in a row. I’ve cut down to 10-15 news lessons Max on any day (and some days I do none)…I want those steady stacks of reviews… When I’m only doing a portion of a big stack of reviews, I hit the “clock-looking icon” that counts me down to 10 more reviews and “dismount”, then pop on “Vacation Mode” to freeze it until my next bunch.
I’ve found that everyone is right about “letting the SRS work for you” by making sure to do a second review on a new lesson that same day, and get through it all that next day, and that next day. I’ve also started “quizzing myself” on a new lesson 5 pack, selecting “need more time”, and rolling back through again and again (covering up the meaning and reading) until I’m totally comfortable with those new lessons before I do the “quiz” and starts its SRS.
I keep thinking that I should use WaniKani app that again did recall or kaniwani or kamesame… but I just can’t make the time!
I do sometimes just look at the old WK level lists of all the words and “review” the old-fashioned way, you see what old items are “dead to me” (super rarely! lol). All of this just takes so much time!
Glad you’ve found the smaller review chunks are giving you encouraging results, Megahertz. I was impressed that you cranked all the way through to level34 before posting. You’ve made great time so far to get that far in only a year! Kudos! Impressive!
I decided just to finish plodding through to 60 and keep looking again and again at my “leeches” to clear them the first time, rather than pause and go review all of the levels I’ve already done. You’ll choose what works for you.
The advice many people have about doing something “fun” with Japanese is good… but I appreciate how aggravating that is when there is still so much I don’t know in irritates me when I’m trying to have “fun”.
Ganbarimashou! Keep up the good work
