Getting the Ball Rolling - Longest Break Before Restarting?

[NikuNeko]

My Wanikani journey has been about the long game. The verrrrrry long game . At first, I was a bit embarrassed to acknowledge the fact, but here goes, I’m on day 1,917! Reading about so many people finishing WK after only a year blows my mind. But then I remember, everyone is different. To those who are speed demons - 素晴らしい！

I joined WaniKani in August 2019 right before moving to Japan to start language school. It was a great tool during school and really helped me build my kanji foundation. When it was a part of my everyday morning routine, I was able to progress pretty steadily. I even passed N2 very much thanks to WK.

After graduating from language school, I have continued living in Japan. With a job and the rigidity of school gone, and lots of travel, my kanji studies buckled and soon I was out of routine (excuses, I know.) My most recent lull was the longest - I didn’t touch reviews for almost a year and have been stuck on level 47 for 245 days! やばい。

Things started to change when I began to feel waves of frustration about my lack of kanji progress and comprehension when reading. Without WK, I wasn’t improving - rather I was losing ground that I had worked so hard to acquire. I figured it was time to buckle up and get back to business.

Since I had switched to vacation mode at some point, I only had around 500 reviews to tackle. It was still painful, but with time I was able to start building momentum, and soon things started to come back more quickly.

I’m happy to say my reviews have reached zero for the first time in months!! And it feels great! I can tell that my grasp on kanji is starting to improve again and I am sensing that maybe level 60 isn’t so far out of reach this time. I just need to keep the ball rolling and remember that kanji is a big key to being able to understand (and enjoy) life abroad in Japan.

I wrote this as a story to share my ongoing experience with others and to remind myself if/when there happens to be another period of lost momentum. I want to remember that it can be difficult to get back into the swing of things, but once done, it’s just one foot in front of the next until the goal is reached.

My goal is to read books without having to look up words! My goal is to understand signs and posts, articles, and flyers without having to rely on Google Translate. My goal is to one day reach level 60! 頑張ります！

Have you ever had a big break from WK? If so, how long was it and what was it like getting the ball rolling again? I’d love to hear your experience!

[simias]

Technically I studied Japanese for around a year on a very light schedule in 2005 when I was 18, then I dropped it and restarted two years ago at 35. That’s a pretty sizeable break, although WaniKani wasn’t involved the first time obviously.

I think it’s easy to get stuck in a negative “what could have been” mindset over these things, especially if you compare yourself to the speedrunners. Also with COVID and all that, 2019 still feels like yesterday to me…

More practically, I think that given your level and that you even passed the N2, it’s not too surprising that you find the last levels of WaniKani frustrating. I’m way below your level but I still felt like, by that point, my time was better spent reading Japanese rather than drilling low frequency kanji on WK.

Of course I still pushed to level 60 for that symbolic achievement…

[polv]

I got to 60 once, then 3-year break or something, then just did reading and took note of vocabularies, reluctant to redo WaniKani for a year – WK isn’t so bad systematically, but missing not only many Kanji, but also many readings; but then I decided to go on yearly subscription, and ended in exactly 1 year. Reset to Level 2, and ended up at Level 42 at the end of subscription.

I realized that, to be serious about not needing to look up Kanji (but not necessarily no need to look up words), you can just look up every Kanji in a monolingual dictionary, and then add every vocabulary to Anki. Then, set up typing deck in Anki. Also, sometimes vocabularies may not use any listed Kanji readings at all (that is 外). But then, I didn’t ended up studying that many Kanji and related vocab.

Kitsun may be easier to set up typing Kana, but won’t have Yomitan dict goodness.

[Inserio]

I took a 6.5 year break.

I'm back, baby! (After not leveling up for 2373 days)

After 2373 days (6.5 years) of letting life get the better of me, I’ve finally done it. [image] I just leveled up to 22. It’s not that I was always on hiatus during those six and a half years, but whenever I did find the motivation to come back to do some reviews, it would be discouraging because I would invariably fail to remember the level 21 kanji that I was supposed to have learned. Not to mention that it would normally be accompanied by a 1000+ review pile that, even if I did power thro…

Being one of the few people who started WaniKani back when it was in alpha (5/26/2012), I’m very likely one of the (if not the) longest-taking^[1] users on the platform.

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1. I.e., of the people who have not reached the max level but still use the service. ↩︎

[catwithcookies]

Slow and steady wins the race.

[ctmf]

I stopped for > 7 months, 2 or 3 times, and also did a drastic reset back down to level 20 (don’t recommend). I’m over 6 years now, but wk isn’t the only thing I do.

I find it useful to just forget about ever “finishing” or worrying about levels. I do some lessons every day, and practice old ones by doing the reviews that come up. For how long? Who cares, forever maybe? It’s part of my daily routine and I’ll probably end up missing it when I’m done with level 60 and got everything burned.

Ironically since I “gave up” worrying about it, I’ve been burning through levels more efficiently than I ever did before.

[servette]

@NikuNeko

I joined WaniKani in August 2019 right before moving to Japan to start language school.

While I guess that it’s somewhat off-topic here, if you don’t mind, just curious about which language school you attended (and where), which course at that school, and what was your overall level of satisfaction with your schooling?

[NikuNeko]

Wow, 6.5 years! It’s great to hear that you got back into it eventually. The review pile can definitely be discouraging, 1,000+ is a lot!

[SugarRushing]

I managed to reach level 27 and then had to reset everything because I tried to go the speed demon route. Not only did I get burnt out, but nothing was sticking. (I might have been cheating my way forward with tapermonkey… )

Anyway… it basically took me 2 years to get back into studying Japanese again because 1) not having reached level 60 kept bugging me and 2) I traveled to Japan this year only to find out I was struggling with basic conversations (I was very close to N3 2 years ago, so being unable to remember how to use past tense and recognize kanjis at the subway hit my pride )