I bought a full year subscription for Wanikani about a month ago and I’ve been so happy with the results so far. I’m recognizing more kanji that I see, learning all sorts of new vocab, and feel like I’m finally starting to “demystify” new Japanese words. But recently, I’ve started to notice some other consequences… As I’ve been climbing to the end of the first 10 levels, I feel like my brain is starting to get overloaded with all the new information. Some terms constantly flip back between Apprentice and Guru in my reviews, I’m commonly mixing up kanji and vocab I used to easily distinguish, and I sometimes can’t recognize kanji that I’ve known since before I even started Wanikani (possibly due to learning similar ones / identifying the radicals). I try to keep my Apprentice items around 100, but with so many in Guru and Master as well, it feels so hard to keep them all in my brain. Has anyone else experienced this pseudo “losing knowledge” effect? Is it due to so much new info in such little time? Am I just becoming aware of how much I don’t actually know vs what I think I know? Any tips for not getting discouraged while trying to keep an ample pace? Thanks in advance for any advice, and I’m passing on encouragement to anyone else who might be struggling with similar stuff!

Also, when I get two kanji confused, I write them down next to each other and find the differences. Then, I remember them. And, like MasuRei said, leave it to the system. You’ll get them. Just hang in there.

[image] jcbrowni: Has anyone else experienced this pseudo “losing knowledge” effect? Well my accuracy started decreasing a bit the further I went in, but I wouldn’t call it losing knowledge. For the first 10 levels or so, the kanji are relatively simple, not just in meaning, but in appearance too. They’re all unique enough that for most of them it’s relatively easy to tell them apart from any of the others you know. After that, the kanji get more complicated and they start looking alike a lot more. You start confusing them with each other, which causes your accuracy to drop. You’re not really “forgetting” anything, it’s more that you don’t breeze through the new items as quickly as you used to since you need some time to learn to tell them apart. After a few repetitions they will eventually stick, so don’t be discouraged by the drop in accuracy, it’s just part of the learning process.

I had the same problem at around level 10! It felt like suddenly I was forgetting everything I had learned and my review accuracy plummeted. A few things helped me: I spent a lot more time on each mnemonic with each new item, I slowed down my pace even more (50-75 items in Apprentice rather than 100), and I put more time into learning grammar and reading so that I would come across kanji more often in the wild. Ultimately you just have to play around with your process of learning and eventually you’ll figure something out! It took me a few weeks at level 10 but I reevaluated my process of doing lessons, pacing, and using the mnemonics and it helped me out a lot.

Start practicing writing the kanji and vocabulary–at least the ones you get wrong. I started doing this around level 25 and I wish I had done it sooner. A small amount of writing practice goes a long way in improving your recognition.

how many lessons are you doing at a time? You might be doing too many at once

[image] jcbrowni: Has anyone else experienced this pseudo “losing knowledge” effect? Yes! But I’ve just reconciled myself to the fact that some kanji like to churn between apprentice and master for a while before they settle down for some enlightened burning. That’s just the way it’s gonna be. I think it’s normal. If it isn’t normal, then I’m abnormal, and this year has been hard enough already without putting that on myself. So that’s what I say.

[image] anon87959063: After that, the kanji get more complicated and they start looking alike a lot more This is probably the biggest reason for the difficulty ramp up. And it holds true all the way to the end. For example, I learned 優 at level 23. But at at level 55 I just learned 憂. Only one small difference and very easy to mix up during a review. Also, the readings are the same.

[image] jcbrowni: Has anyone else experienced this pseudo “losing knowledge” effect? This is where you want to be! It may feel bad right now, but it’s an indication that you’re learning is getting better. Our brains are tricky. They learn things in stages and build models of what we’ve learned. Sometimes those models are good, sometimes not so much. When a model is not quite good enough, our brains will tear it apart and rebuild a new, more complex model which works better. This is very common in language learning. When children learn to talk, they will learn every verb form by rote. They have no problem with irregular forms because everything is its own thing. So they may use, for example, “go” and “went” properly. But at some point they realized that adding -ed to a verb makes it past tense. Suddenly, they’re saying “go-ed” and so on. It’s only after they’ve learned a bit more that they can put the irregular verbs in proper context. This happens in other learning environments as well. Back when I was studying jujutsu, we had a term for this. It was “green belt disease”, though it happened at various ranks. Basically, all the student’s techniques would suddenly fall apart. Nothing would work. Totally disheartening. This could last for days or weeks, but inevitably and as if by magic, one day their technique would all come back, better than ever. It would be shockingly different from one class to the next. Their brains had just learned a better way to do what they’d already been doing. So a lot of people have been giving you advice and a lot of it is good. Figuring out how to feed our brains most effectively is part of this process. But in addition to all that, it helps to relax, take a breath and realize that maybe, just maybe, you’re just on the cusp of an epiphany.

One thing that can be disheartening about spaced repetition is that the algorithm is going to show you everything you have a hard time learning again and again. On one hand, that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work. On the other hand, it also means that our easy wins float unceremoniously into the infrequent review pile. So keep in mind that this feeling is very normal. Also, and this may relate to what sporadic was saying about “green belt disease,” I often find when I’m learning languages that the worst struggle periods come before big breakthroughs.

I second this! I write them all down when I do lessons, and also any I miss during reviews, as well as the ones I struggled to remember, but ultimately got right. (Side note- if you don’t know the stroke order for writing a kanji, look that up too). As someone else mentioned above, ones that I get mixed up I write next to each other and make sure to sort out what distinguishes them. I find the WK lists of “similar kanji” are very incomplete, at least for the way my brain works.

Feel like I'm getting "worse" the higher level I go?

WaniKani Requesting Help

Rowena March 10, 2021, 8:59am 15

Just popping in to link to the BBB thread:

BishBashBosh: Cram Apprentice 1 items and recent failures

Topic		Replies	Views
About to finish level 6 WaniKani	26	1050	April 29, 2025
The hell that is reality WaniKani	18	1702	October 11, 2020
Things are starting to get mixed up in my head WaniKani	22	2613	February 10, 2020
I've hit the wall WaniKani	19	2995	July 31, 2018
My retention seems to be getting worse Questions	20	979	February 19, 2024

Feel like I'm getting "worse" the higher level I go?

BishBashBosh: Cram Apprentice 1 items and recent failures

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