This current level of WaniKani has been really tough for me. Not really because of how hard the content is, but how hard I’m finding it these days to sit down and do the reviews.
Over time, I have become busier with other responsibilities, and WaniKani has never been at the front of my priorities, but I for sure was very engaged for a long time. These days, I get so out of the habit of doing them. Even after getting some more free time back again, I’m almost finding it harder to keep at the reviews, without as much of a routine in place.
I’ve been on this level for 122 days already, even though my average is 30 (though this is skewed a bit from the earlier levels). A lot of the time, I start, do a few reviews, then get completely distracted. I can’t sit down and finish all my reviews in one go a lot of the time. And often when this happens, the review pile gets bigger, which makes it even harder to finish. Kind of a snowball effect.
Even when I manage to get through them all, it always ends up stacking back up so fast - probably because I got so many wrong because I had left some reviews for quite a long time. It makes it really hard to get properly back on top.
I’ve barely been taking on new lessons, because I can rarely get my review pile back under a manageable amount. I probably would only take on new lessons if I got it below about 100 or 80 or so.
I just don’t know what to do about it or how to get back to keeping up like I used to. I guess my enthusiasm is lessening over the years, but that doesn’t mean I want to drop it. So just wondering if others have any advice or are in a similar boat and found something that helps.
Are you doing other things besides WaniKani? At your level you have a very good kanji foundation, more than enough to start reading Japanese. I think it’s easier to find the motivation to do your SRS reviews if you know it’s helping towards a concrete goal instead of just doing reviews for reviews’ sake.
I think it’s easier to find the motivation to do your SRS reviews if you know it’s helping towards a concrete goal instead of just doing reviews for reviews’ sake.
100% agree. I’ve been reading native material for 7 months now + doing Anki and WK everyday, and even though it can get overwhelming sometimes, because I am seeing the huge benefits of it (like being able to read words with kanji that I’ve learned on WK, or seeing words that I’ve added to my Anki deck in the wild) it’s very motivating and it’s easy to keep going because I know it’s worth it.
When I come across an unknown kanji and it turns out that I’ll be learning it on WK in a couple levels, it also gives me even more motivation.
If I was doing just WK tho and nothing else, I would probably quit a long time ago.
Hi, just wanted to say, I totally understand. I’ve had several periods over the years where my progress stagnated for 200+ days…. and where my reviews have built into the thousands.
It’s okay and even healthy to let yourself rest sometimes, and focus on other areas of your life!
When you want to get back into it, here are some of the things I learned—
When my reviews were in the 1000s, I limited myself to knocking it down by 100 each day. For example, the first day I’d do 100 reviews and get to 900, and the second day I’d do 100 reviews plus however many it took to get me down to 800. Breaking it up into manageable goals helped with the intimidation factor.
I start to feel stuck and discouraged when I stay on a level too long. When I stagnate, I work on getting the pile down to 0 first, and after that I get back into my rule of 15 lessons a day no matter what. My apprentice pile has been unstably high at some points, but each lesson gets me a step closer to level up. Plus, new items are so fresh they can be not so bad to remember.
From levels 7-18 I was incredibly slow, and felt discouraged from keeping with the program. Since level 19 I’ve been sticking to a plan that levels me up in 8-15 days. It’s scary to add lessons sometimes when I feel like there are so many in reviews I need to remember better, but it turns out a brain can handle a bit more than I think, and the faster leveling has done much to renew my enthusiasm.
From my reset, and WK become relatively easy, and the number of reviews in WaniKani become a chore.
Don’t do too few reviews at time. I mean, do at least 50-100 at a time. The eventual key is to zero the reviews every day or every a few days. Brace yourself for a daily habit.
Aim for 0 reviews. Though, no need to zero every time you touch WK. There is Wrap Up button.
Order by lower levels first may be helpful. (Inside Settings, if that isn’t chosen already.) You aren’t in WaniKani to learn new vocab and Kanji. Rather, most of the time, you are here to review them. If the vocab really is new, you probably should also confirm with outside source, web search outside WK, not just here.
Double Check or Anki mode may be helpful. Similarly, you aren’t here to learn to fixate to WaniKani keywords, so it might be a better plan to be more flexible.
Stop doing any new lessons. It is only making the pile bigger. Also, if you are getting a lot of the reviews wrong, you have enough to (re)learn, for now.
Set a target daily number of reviews to do each day. For example 100. Make sure you do that number. Break in into multiple sessions if that works better (50/50 or 30/40/30).
Do you have a reason for learning Japanese? Because you need to, or because you want to? Put doing the work of studying in the context of your motivation for learning Japanese.
I try to immerse with videos mostly. I used to do Bunpro which I know I need to get back on top of too, but it’s been doubly hard to keep on top of two SRSs so I’ve barely been doing that lately. A while ago I tried to immerse with games but the reading in them was quite challenging and didn’t understand most of it. I would like to read books, but don’t really know how to go about that yet and don’t feel good enough yet to spend a bunch on something I can’t read.
Yeah, I have definitely felt the benefits of wanikani as more and more things start to click in other media. I guess even having motivation to consume that other media is a challenge in itself even though I try to (somewhat unsuccessfully) make a habit of it.
I have actually used that strategy you mention during this level too, though my review pile has never gone as high as yours. I think I was at around 300 and I tried to knock it down by 100 every day. It did work quite well, only problem was I still didn’t manage to keep on top of it for very long before it went back up again.
I definitely feel like I’m stagnating without taking on new lessons, so doing new ones might not be a bad idea. It’ll definitely be tough to keep on top of that many apprentice items but it could be worth a try if it pushes me out of this level. I do think I get in a loop with my older items of continuously getting them wrong and then not feeling stimulated enough to properly check on the description again to relearn it. Or sometimes I accidentally automatically click next without even looking at the answer.
Yeah, I often get 10 reviews in and just can’t stay sat at my computer anymore, which is kinda an issue. I think I’ve found I can do more in one go with music though so maybe I just need to recognise and do that every time.
I am here to learn kanji, this is my main tool for that. I understand that the vocabulary is mainly to reinforce those kanji though. So kanji is really my focus.
That’s the thing, I haven’t been doing new lessons barely at all, I just can’t get past my review stagnation.
But yeah. Daily target over multiple sessions might help. Though I feel like the apprentice items are a bit of an issue because they come back later the same day, and I often don’t do another session later even though I should.
I’m learning just because I’d like to. I started it as something interesting and productive to do with free time, and I enjoyed it a lot and found it interesting. My main aim is to later be able to read books and play games in Japanese.
Do you do the vocab lessons on WK ? Having a hybrid approach were you quizz yourself on the kanji themselves on WK but go through the associated vocab on a faster SRS might help you.
For me typing the vocab is way too slow and frustrating so I’m adding each level vocab on jpbd and do only the rads/kanji on WK. This let me have exposure to the kanji and drilling through the example sentences (and audio is a godsend for the rendaku).
Then when I’m quizzed on the WK reading it’s the validation if yes or no I’ve mastered the kanji enough. For now it’s working very well.
The biggest benefit is to go from an exhaustive validation logic (did you “pass” all the terms of the level) to a proficiency one (did you make or not an error on the kanjis you’re supposed to know).
Ahh, I see. I would probably still do the vocab on wanikani tbh as its my preferred tool, and probably particularly best because I often review offline via smoldering durtles. Think it may be better for me to have a centralised place for it, but yeah I get what you’re saying too.
I do them on my phone occasionally yeah, particularly when offline. I think my accuracy decreases on phone though. I think I prefer computer but don’t always have that luxury.
Break might help, though I probably wouldnt do vacation mode as I expect that would mess up every single item rather than just a few. I worry if I took a break it would hurt my motivation to continue more than it already is. I definitely don’t want to quit though, just finding it getting hard is all.
Typo checking is done by per-character difference distance, of all synonyms including hidden ones. Sometimes opposite or just different meanings are marked as correct. Only readings have no typo checking in the first place (but also less Kana characters).
I used another script, shake when no exact, to retype with no misspelling.
Of course, it would pose no problem in Anki mode. I presume mobile apps have this Anki mode too.