Frick Level 14

[LaughingLiving]

My tough level, it turns out? 16.

I don’t even know whether it’s level 16 itself. But first, I’m approaching six months into WaniKani, and just as I leveled up to 17, I abruptly lost a lot of enthusiasm for this whole process. (That is going to hit me particularly hard, since I’m learning Japanese entirely for fun, with absolutely no goals.)

So I decided to let my number of apprentice items drop below 100 and keep it there. I skipped a day or two of new lessons, let my apprentice items drop back to about 80, then did ten or fifteen new lessons over the next day or two.

Despite that, my number of apprentice items is currently over 100, because I keep missing reviews! Even if I hadn’t decided to take it easier on my new lessons, I wouldn’t have had room for any. I’m now eight days into Level 17 but I still have 33 vocabulary items from Level 16 to study, yet I can’t make my apprentice items drop below 100 for any length of time, forget dropping below 90 or whatever.

I’m not upset about this, because about the time I started Level 16 I really felt a difference in my ability to understand written Japanese (especially NHK Easy), but it’s not what I expected! And it’s a little discouraging, because I think I’m going to start seeing my first items to burn in just two or three weeks, which implies that my workload is going to increase soon.

Oh well, onward and (eventually) upward! Or not, if I choose.

[LaughingLiving]

It’s two weeks after I leveled up to 17, and I’m still not finished cleaning up the Level 16 vocabulary (though I’m close). And yet my apprentice numbers still creep up above 100 sometimes.

And items start coming up for burning a week from today, so it really will get worse. I’m enjoying this time of relaxing a bit, and will probably not do any new lessons for a time—possibly ever, honestly. But I’m going to try to keep up with my reviews, because otherwise, all my time put in so far will be largely wasted.

Life is moving on for me—I have other priorities that are calling to me, for which I do have goals, unlike with Japanese—but I still really like WaniKani, and may return to it eventually.