The first Japanese arrived in Hawaii. The first automobiles and motorcycles were produced. And the American inventor Lamarcus Thompson patented the world’s first roller coaster.
The year was 明治１８年or Meiji 18, which in Gregorian calendar is 1885. But that was not all that happened that year. In 1885, the German psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus published his major work “Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology”, which features such concepts as “spaced repetition” and “forgetting curve”.
These are the very concepts the WaniKani learning techniques are based on in year 2025. “You will forget what you don’t remember”, as Ebbinghaus would note in a movie German accent for people doing their WaniKani reviews.
Cars, motorcycles and roller coasters have come a long way since 1885, and Japanese people are a common sight in Hawaii these days. So maybe the learning methods from that era should be reevaluated as well. Personally, I have eliminated “punishments” from all of my wrong answers on WaniKani for some two years now. Doing that is not a problem, just reload the site after the wrong answer so that the answer is not saved, and get it right once it reappears in the same review. This leads to the current learning process always ending with a success instead of a failure.
The 1885 learning method would throw the incorrect kanji or word right back to the first learning phase. To me it just doesn’t make any sense: it would be better to let the person try answering again within that same learning phase. But after all, a Civilization video game designed by Hermann Ebbinghaus would’ve undoubtedly thrown the player back to the very beginning after one lost battle and simultaneously erasing the development of one’s dwellings for the last 150 years.
To conclude: learning Japanese is hard enough a task even without methods ranging from the 1880s. Maybe an upgrade to the WaniKani roller coaster would also be in order.
best,
Jari
from Finland
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If something’s giving you trouble you should see it more often…
