After a sudden break of 3 years, I finally decided to get back to wanikani, and the durtle’s welcome back party is… rough, to say the least.
I’m level 44, 4543 burned items, 2300 reviews, and not sure what’s the best way to proceed.
I’ve seen similar threads of advice, but they mainly talk about using the website directly, and I only ever used smouldering durtles exclusively, so much that using the site feels weird (seriously guys, how do you do it?), so I’m limited to approaches that I can use with this app.
For the burned items, the main thing is that I don’t trust the burned items to actually be burned in my mind, so I’d love a way to turn them all to the level just below that, or something equivalent.
For the reviews, my fear is that the sheer amount and the fact that I forgot everything means that I’ll never get over the pile if I don’t subdivide it in a meaningful way: my review sessions currently have a ~10% success rate, and I don’t expect it to improve while juggling 2000 forgotten words. I did see a way to order reviews by level in the app, but I’m not sure if I should, or just stick to the shuffle and persevere.
Still, I’m determined to get back in the saddle! I’d be happy to hear any advice to make a smooth return
Not possible. Only unburn individual items or resetting your level.
My question would be what is your short term goal for now? What do you want to do with Japanese? Just doing SRS is probably not very motivating. Lvl 44 allows quite a wide range of content already.
I would focus on getting the review pile down and not worry about the burned items. Personally, I would order by level and do around 200 every day until the review amount becomes manageable again.
Then, when you have your reviews under control and are eased back into the flow, I would focus on USING Japanese. By reading or by doing some listening/watching of videos or learning some grammar.
Each time you think “ah that’s something that I might have already seen in WK but totally forgot” you can unburn the individual item. These are then your “new lessons” for a while.
When you have your routine up and running, you can also start introducing new lessons again at a rate that feels comfortable.
I think I made this exact post like five months ago lol, but welcome back!
As someone who was in a similar spot, I ended up sorting my reviews by level (you can do that in vanilla WK now in settings, which is nice!!), starting by oldest to newest and kept working backwards from around the same amount of reviews that you have (2400) until I hit a wall of like “Oh I definitely do not know anything past here” and I reset from level 49 to level 40. I still had 900 or so reviews after that (and those two days I worked on that pile sucked miserably), but then I was back to zero and felt a lot more confident in knowing what I recalled for real.
I feel like the first few sessions were miserable, but after a week or so of poking at it, my burns remembered ratio was about 80% which I felt pretty happy with.
Also worth mentioning, I totally get not being confident in the burn items! I feel like I might reset some of those later, but moving onto native material instead of going further backwards with Wani Kani has been far more beneficial for figuring out which older kanji I no longer recognize (not as many as I thought!)
Anyway, it’s a grind but it’s totally doable and gets so much easier if you keep chipping away at it. Best of luck!
