Forgetting Burned Kanji/Vocab Stinks

WaniKani
#1

Every year I seem to go through a phase where I forget a ton of the vocabulary and kanji I’ve already learned. This week, I used the quiz tool to go through all the burned lessons to determine which ones I have forgotten and boy it was a lot. I have resurrected those items now and brought myself a backlog of 2400 items. :rofl:

And although I know I could have reset my level, I didn’t really want to as there are also so many kanji and vocabulary from the levels that I do know that I didn’t want to unburn/redo.

Now that these items are back at apprentice level again, I am now seeing many of the ones I couldn’t remember on the self quiz are coming back very quickly. So I am confident that this time they will stick a lot better.

My question to you guys is, what do you do when you forget kanji/vocab in WK? Does anyone else have a plan of how they practice burned material so they don’t forget it?

Honestly, I wish there was a way to have the burned items stay in an enlightened state forever with a 3 month gap between reviews.

3 Likes
#2

Why resurrect them? Just take the quiz for your burn items every month or so.

It’s not cheating in my opinion. You are not seeing many of them in the wild and you have already burned them. That means you know them pretty well.

A refresher every month or 2 would be alright. I’m not worried about it yet but I know that when I take a look at my burns sometime in the future, the ones I miss I’ll be able to recall immediately after looking at the answer :slight_smile:

3 Likes
#3

How do you take this quiz for burned items? :thinking:

2 Likes
#4

By using the Self-Study Quiz userscript :slight_smile:

5 Likes
#5

Thank you!

1 Like
#6

Also, if you use the android mobile app, you can do a self study quiz there. I am not sure about the ios version however.

Personally, I prefer this because it gives a summary of all the wrong answers at the end which is much more convenient.

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#7

I don’t consider taking the burned quiz every month or so cheating. More its that I just get busy and don’t look back at my burned items very often. Unfortunately, because of work, I let my reviews stack up for about 3 months. This is another reason for my review count being so high.

Before unburning about 800 items, I had about 2300 burned items. That is a lot to go through every month honestly. As it is, it took me about 5 hours to get through everything. A lot of that time though is because I reread the mnemonics every time I failed an item on the quiz.

Even still, lets say your really fast and can get through one card every 2 seconds, 1 second for reading, 1 second for meaning, that would still be about 1 hour 17 mins straight.

#8

It depends. When I encounter a word I know I’ve learned on WK, but can’t remember the reading or meaning, I either resurrect it or leave it be. Sometimes I add it on Koohi.cafe instead. I never resurrect radicals, and only rarely resurrect kanji.

So it’s really a case-by-case thing for me. It’s okay to not remember everything perfectly, as the more you consume native content, the more likely it will be that you’ll find the word again and learn it in context. There have been times where I only truly learn a word by finding it in the wild, no matter how much I’ve SRS’ed the word beforehand. I don’t go out of my way to practice the items that I have burned just to make sure I know them. That sounds very time consuming.

7 Likes
#9

That’s been my experience as well, but I finished WK in about 2 years.

At a slower pace, say 3-5 years, you’ll take longer to get into reading and in that case I think the self study script every so often would be helpful.

3 Likes
#10

Literally absolutely nothing

2 Likes
#11

I don’t really have plans of ever SRS-ing items from burned/suspended flash cards. I’ll surely forget some of them, but that’s okay. If I do forget, I can always look them up in the dictionary when I encounter them. And maybe they’ll stick after that, or maybe I’ll just forget them again.

I forget words in English all the time, haha, despite it being my native language and despite the fact that I’m a fairly prolific reader with a decently large vocabulary. I don’t think there’s really any way to permanently avoid forgetting some of the things you’ve learned. But thankfully dictionaries exist, so if you forget a word and can’t figure it out from context, there’s no harm in looking it up.

1 Like