I don’t wan’t to jump the gun, but it’s looking like I should reach level 60 by the end of the year (I’ve been going since August '17, so on that timescale, i’m close)
I use a burn review script (for kanji), and lately I’ve been getting a few wrong, not like totally blanking - but maybe getting similar ones mixed up. As such I’ve been thinking at some point once i get to 60, I will reset so that I can clean up the ones i’m shaky on.
I was wondering what people would suggest I do upon getting to lvl 60…sooooo… POLL. Especially interested what others who have finished, or anticipate finishing in the the not too distant future intend to do / did?
Or just any advice from people who have been there, on the post Wanikani world SO what did / do you think you will do?
continue and burn all
burn all kanji and reset
reset straight away
reduce time on Wanikani and focus on grammar / speaking / listening
I can’t really know, but my grammar is… ah… interesting, and I don’t understand why anyone in their right minds would reset ¯_(ツ)_/¯ (Why would you drag out the review pain?) But I’m also Level 11 and have no idea if (hopefully) or when I’ll finish.
Haha - yeah I can see what you’re saying. But weirdly the reviews no longer cause me any pain - Wanikani is deeply ingrained in my life, it is actually difficult to imagine NOT doing it !!!
You can do it !!! (unless you don’t want to, which is also fine)
Applying your kanji knowledge elsewhere is going to be the best way to keep it fresh in your mind. That’d mean doing some grammar studies and lots of reading. In my experience, encountering kanji and vocab during reading is what makes them stick the most, rather than reviewing them on their own. It provides that additional context and meaning you wouldn’t get elsewhere.
I personally kept doing reviews after reaching 60 for a few months before I realized I was wasting my time. I’d say do what @SleepyOne said and read a ton. If you want to keep studying words you find when reading (or listening or whatever), add them to Kitsun or a similar SRS platform. That’s what I’ve been doing for over three months and it’s been going well.
I am probably an outlier here, but I feel like your time is much better spent interacting with native content once you have completed wanikani. The wild acts like reviews as far as kanji are concerned, but more importantly you are forced to actually try to understand Japanese communication, literature etc., some of which are (presumably) the main reasons you are studying it. This second part of learning also seems to take quite a long time (you may have heard of the intermediate plateau), so it might be worthwhile to begin spending more time on this type of activity even before the end of wanikani. Also, I think reading is a really awesome tool. Read about something you are interested in that was written in Japanese and have fun while studying. Anyway, that is my 53 cents. Best of luck with your journey!!!
Oh, also, I will add a plug for floflo here. It has been renamed to something or other recently, but it is a great tool for building vocabulary that will provide a really great scaffold to begin reading. Give it a look. It is awesome.
Let the SRS work as it’s intended to - anything you’ve forgotten will drop. Anything you still remember will get burned. Keep doing your reviews until you burn everything, but otherwise seek content outside of WK. You’ll get diminishing returns if you try to reset.
I’m probably gonna keep doing reviews for a few weeks/months after 60, but just gonna give up on leeches after that. If they are not gonna stick they aren’t gonna stick. I will encounter them eventually by reading a lot more. Most of them are probably not that important, anyway (and not worth the frustration), and I’d rather expand my vocabulary in areas that actually interest me.
The thing I should’ve done is the most popular suggestion - focusing on other aspects of Japanese learning. TamanegiNoKame’s comment hits most of what I’d say. Really that should already be happening by the time you’re at 60. Even at your current level.
…what I did do is basically drop all Japanese learning for ~4 months and forget half of what I knew. Didn’t help that I blazed through the latter half of WK content super fast. So I reset so that I could go at a slower pace and build it up over more time.
So yeah anyway don’t do that one.
Yeah, I’ve already done it, and I’m kinda agreeing with this. Or at least resetting as low as I did. Could’ve just gone down to like level 40 or something.
This comment just ended up being me agreeing with the consensus and then complaining about myself whoops
I often find good value in whizzing through textbooks for a second time, as it allows me to pick up on things that didn’t make sense the first time - especially as I (theoretically!) should have a better understanding of how things work in general. And it usually takes a fraction of the time.
So, once I’ve burned everything (or close enough anyway) I’m considering resetting. Plus it’ll give me a chance to review the context sentences properly, which I mostly skipped the first time as many were way too advanced for me. Either way, it’ll only be a few minutes a day as my focus has shifted to other resources now.
I’ve reset down to 0 on 2, maybe 3 occasions now. The higher level I have been resetting from, the more I’ve regretted it, because I end up wasting time on a bunch of things I already knew, so it was largely a waste of time to do so. I typically recommend resetting down 2-3 levels if it’s been a while since you’ve done reviews to cut down on the apprentice items and help catch up, but otherwise I strongly recommend against it.
Resetting from 60 looks like a different question, but I still hold the same belief there - it’s not worth the time. If you do want to go back and review everything level-by-level, the Self Study script will allow you to do that without having to go through the journey of resetting.
I see the best use of your time being studying grammar plus reading and listening to native material, because learning any language from only a textbook won’t help you in the real world unless you start to actually use it somewhere.
I recommend focusing on something other than wanikani! Once you’ve learned this many kanji it becomes more fun to actually use it in reading, listening, grammar, etc
I am close to the end of the levels. I have been learning for a long time but I will reset the whole thing and start again once done. Why? I think the biggest asset to this program is that we learn the parts of the kanji and cement them in our memories. The radicals are the foundation of most of the kanji, and I haven’t completely got them all yet. The more you practice the better you will remember them. However, this time around, I will be actively reading proper Japanese stories to use the kanji in a different setting. Another way to remember them longer.
To reach 60 and reset straight away seems like… an odd choice. I don’t see myself doing that, or resetting at all to be honest. There are opportunity costs of what you could be doing with those hundreds of hours rehashing a lot of stuff that you already know.
Not to mention there’s ample vocab out there in the wild that isn’t covered on WK. Even some surprisingly common stuff.
In any event I plan to spend at least a few months going through stuff I still have in queue. Burning them all would be nice, don’t know if I’ll get there. But the workload should steadily decrease and I’m happy to spend more of that time with grammar, listening practice, actively using the language, etc.
Can’t emphasize enough how important it is to use the language and promote things from passive memory (recognition) to active memory (production).
As others have said, reading real Japanese might be much more useful than going through Wanikani again. Of course reseting isn’t a bad thing if you feel like you will learn and retain more knowledge. However, other aspects of the language might be even more important overall.
I’m not on level 60 yet (I might reach it by next week) but I think I’m greatly reducing my time on Wanikani afterwards. I’m honestly tired of SRS. Recently I have dropped bunpro after reaching level 70 and I have finally stopped anki (for handwriting and extra vocab). I was very reluctant at first but it felt great to suddenly have some more free time for native content. Nowadays I just want to have fun reading novels and playing games in Japanese.
I plan to start practicing more writing and speaking after Wanikani as well.
The current plan is to keep going until I burn everything, but given how much time I currently devote to WK, after a week or two of level 60 it’s going to be a HUGE reduction in time commitment. Reviews are an easy way to fill in gaps in my work schedule, but I might not keep to my twice-a-day big review sessions anymore. I love WK guys, but I’m tired of it.
This is me too. My goals are to consume native content in the original language, so it aligns well with that since speaking and output aren’t priorities. Not that they’re unimportant or that I don’t try, but it’s something to work on after the goal.
I fully intend to burn and reset after 60, but who knows what’ll happen between now and then.
I went the burn everything route. It was good at first, since it allowed me to sort out my leeches from the rest and work more directly on them. However, that backfired around the time I had only ~200 items left. Basically, I was able to just remember which items were left. Even if I had a leech confusing two items, for instance, since I knew one was burned already it simply had to be the other one. I noticed that that “skill” didn’t transfer very well to real life (as expected).
Looking back, what I’d do (and plan to do still) is take the list of my leeches (there are tools that can give you how many times you failed items, that’s a good proxy) and import them into a different SRS like kitsun while adding more items to keep on my toes.
That being said, as @TamanegiNoKame mentioned, enjoying native content is already very nice. It’s not the most efficient way to study, but it’s way more fun (and I’m basically only doing that now that I burned everything here)
SO what did / do you think you will do?
