I feel like I’m at a point where I cannot progress. I used to level up once a month, but ever since I reached level 21 in December of last year, it’s slowed down significantly. It took me 3 months to reach level 22 then only 2 months to reach level 23. It’s been over 6 months and I’m still stuck at 23.
The biggest issue is that I’m locked in an infinite loop of trying to whittle away at 200-400 review pile. For every 100 reviews I do I get some wrong, which leads to them getting demoted to Guru or Apprentice which in turn leads to the pile growing even faster than before. I knew I was already getting a notable amount of my reviews wrong, but the new widget feature now shows me that I’m always “outside of the learning zone” with consistent 80% correct reviews.
The other issue I’ve had that stems from this is trying to tackle all the words trapped in apprentice that in my mind feel extremely similar. The best example of this is is the recent unholy trinity of 支援、応援、and 援助. According to WaniKani, 支援 means support and only support. 応援 means support or aid. 援助 means assistance/aid and only that. Ignoring the fact that support and aid are practically interchangeable in meaning, all 3 words use the “aid” kanji 援 and because of this they are all taught at the same time. 支援 and 援助 are still stuck in Apprentice, while 応援 is in Enlightened. Why? Probably because 1. According to WK it can mean support or aid and 2. It is the 1 word out of the 3 I frequently hear being used in the Japanese I listen to. The other example that drives me mad is the massive pool of words that end in 業 and you just have to rote memorize (or take the 1-in-3 guess) if it means work (作業), industry (工業, 産業) or business (営業).
If there was a way to mark a word as a leech and hide it from review similar to what you can do with Anki, I think this would help my situation. In general I think the ability to hide words would be nice. I understand words are being taught more for memorizing kanji kun- and on-yomi, but sometimes the words feel so niche that it feels like it is a waste of space in your memory. The best example I have is 官金 as I used this word during a conversation with a native Japanese person in proper context, but they just looked at me puzzled and confused. I said it again, then showed her the word and she said it was the first time she had ever heard it in her life.
TL;DR: I’m stuck at level 23 with a review pile constantly in the 300s and an increasing apprentice pile.
How do I tackle the review pile?
How do I deal with words that blend together in my mind due to similar kanji usage but English translations that according to WaniKani are different such as 支援、応援、and 援助? (Why is 支援 only support, 援助 is only aid, and 応援 is both support and aid? Would it be reasonable to add user synonyms due to support and aid meaning the same thing in my mind?)
Is there any way to hide words from the main review pile similar to what you can do in Anki?(Both for leech/critical condition words and words that feel extremely niche or unused in authentic Japanese discussion such as 官金)
Kinda hard to answer since it seems to be mainly from making mistake during reviews. You could try to come up with your own mnemonic. I do that on the words I kept getting wrong and the WK mnemonic didnt stick with me. Since you have existing review pile right now, could you try to power through them? Maybe not in one go, but maybe do a big chunk, take some rest, then come back to do it again. Finishing all reviews in the day. Then do extra review on the ones you got wrong, try to think if the mnemonic is working for you or not, if not try to come up with your own. Also get a script to redo your answer, definitely don’t penalise yourself if you just made a typo mistake or use a “close enough” word in english that WK didnt accept.
If you look up on other dictionary, the meanings for 支援, 援助, and 応援, all include aid, assistance, support. I would just add the extra meanings to make WK accept it. Definitely don’t worry about tiny different in meaning/nuance until you start reading actual native content. It is much easier to understand the meaning with extra context of being in a sentence/paragraph/scenario.
No, sadly, there is none. What I do is, for example, those baseball words that I give zero care about, I just cheat. If there are words you feel like doesn’t align with your study goal, just cheat it out of the way. WK doesn’t offer a way to choose which words we like to study, but we can use script to work around it.
Rant
Seriously, I dont care about baseball. 球威 (A Pitcher’s Stuff) I’m sorry what? This word is 100% useless to me, I don’t even know what it means based on WK’s definition, I had to look it up outside. Kanji is Sphere + Might/Dignity. Sure Sphere comes up often for baseball already, but like I said, I don’t care about baseball. If I get any of the baseball related terms wrong, I just cheat it to mark it as correct and get it out of my life.
If I ever somehow get into baseball, which is extremely unlikely, I will just relearn it later.
Something I do when learning new kanji / vocab now is that I cross check it with another dictionary to see if I like their meanings better, if it makes more sense to me, or easier to memorise. Then I add it to WK User Synonyms.
So you think it’s be best to just blast through all 300 reviews in a day then the following day or same day (before they disappear in 24 hours), do the recent mistakes extra study mode? I feel like 300 is quite big, but maybe doing the batches of 100 then doing the recent mistakes review would be smaller and easier to digest possibly? The pile could grow, but maybe the mistake reviews would help things leave from the apprentice pile?
Generally, whenever review pile becomes too big, it might be an indication that you should reduce the number of lessons you are doing and concentrate on reviews instead, at least for a while.
Also, it’s a good idea to use the “wrap up” button, to do 10 reviews at at time, instead of trying to do them all in one go. If, after doing 10 reviews, you feel you can do more – you can do next 10 right away, and so on. The impotant thing is to deal with smaller numbers at a time.
As for less common words, yes some of the words WK teaches, are not very common. Such words are here to help memorize the readings of the kanji that make that word, so they are not entirely useless. Still, I agree that being able to exclude such words, could be a useful option, but, as far as I know, WK doesn’t allow it. There might be some userscript for it though.
As for distinguishing between words that use similar kanji, I recommend looking at the context sentences. Also, you are currently at the level at which a lot of people start reading at least simple resources like NHKやさしいことばニュース | NEWS WEB EASY so if you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend it. Because ultimately, the only way to really understand the difference between similar words – is to see them in context through reading.
Yeah, I think like you and Valorzinski are suggesting, I should do big batch reviews like I’ve been doing, but also do the extra reviews to help reinforce the words I got wrong. Im curious if you could let me know about that undo script, as my current work around for typos is doing the wrap-up feature until the only word left is the one I typed wrong, then backing out so it saves the answers for everything besides that.
Before I used to do this, but I think I got distracted by the massive pile. Next session when I get a word wrong that I swear sounds like something else/close enough, I’ll verify by checking out Jisho. Also, I 100% agree with the native context comment. Seeing it in context rather than just 3 “Rawr X3” sample sentences helps a lot as that’s how I understood 応援 and other words.
Yeah, it would be nice if there was a way to mark certain words. I know it’s probably because they think “You’re cheating yourself” but as you mentioned in the rant there are some words that are very niche and feel like they will just hinder you more than help.
6 months on his current level would suggest he’s probably not spamming new lessons.
I think he’s just in leech hell.
No way out but forward. Knock out all the reviews like other users said and drill the things you got wrong. The more you wait, the more leeches you’re just going to make.
EDIT: 220 Apprentice with seemingly no new lessons coming in. Yeah, it will be tough, but I think all you can do is buckle down and go through it. The fact that you have been exposed to all those items quite a bit should help. Add synonyms for things that are similar enough, or ignore, and for things you get mixed up devise a way or mnemonic to remember which is which
Besides the recent update regarding directions, I get new lessons very few and far due to the 6 months stuck at level 23. If I make it to level 24, I’ll try to only do it in bulks of 10 though. At the moment I just have the default 15.
I’ll have to look into userscript as another user mentioned using something like that regarding my situation.
I’ve used NHK easy news in the past and it definitely helps me practice Japanese language rather than just memorizing words and kanji. I’m hoping to take N2 next year, so it would be good for me to try it out again. I actually just checked and now there is some new agreement you have to sign and give your region to. A bit suspicious knowing NHK and their infamous bullying for money. However I didn’t need to make an account, so hopefully that means they aren’t going to haggle me for money.
I see. One issue may be that I tend to do WaniKani only when I am at work so I don’t fry my brain outside of work or during the weekend when I’m supposed to be resting. Maybe I should just turn the vacation mode on and off during the weekends so the stack doesn’t build during the weekends (even though there tends to be only a few added during the weekend).
I agree though. Having a smaller deck makes it more manageable, since you are only dealing with words that you are supposed to be dealing with, not some word that has been waiting days for you but hasn’t been lucky enough to appear in the review pile roulette.
+1 for reviewing mistakes. And especially relearning when necessary. A trait of people who have high leeches (and even from my own experience) is getting things wrong in srs and then being done with it. If an item is gotten wrong once (and especially twice) it’s an indication that you need to revisit it in all probability. If it’s an “ah yeah wait duh” moment thats an exception. But if you forgot or are mixing it up with another item, then I would revisit it and try to make sure you won’t make that same mistake twice.
My rule was always that I would do my best to get all my reviews right, but I if I got one wrong I would take it as meaning I didn’t do my lessons thoroughly enough. Then, if I got it wrong again in the future, that was a big red flag. I would make sure to read the mnemoics again and maybe sometimes come up with special ones to help me remember.
It sounds like a lot of extra work, but in the end it let’s you get a higher accuracy and thus less reviews + your reviews feel easier since you know the content better. I was able to go full speed with like a 96% accuracy thanks to that.
Good to hear. I’ll really focus on reviewing mistakes from now on, especially with the mistakes done twice. I wish if you got apprentice words wrong a couple times it’d automatically put it back in the lesson tab rather than going to recent mistakes for 24 hours then vanishing. As an example for why this is an issue: Today I studied for about 1-2 hours and got 153 reviews complete (still 228 in the review pile though), with there now being 46 recent mistakes. If the leech words were put back into the lesson pile and removed from review, I could slowly do a few at a time and add them back to the deck once I’ve gotten the review pile consistently low. However since I only have 24 hours till they vanish, I have to do them ASAP all while trying to clear the review pile.
I use this for the script to enable re-do answer mid review. Even if you dont intend to cheat at all, this does catch typo, or when you answered close enough but WK didn’t like it. For example WK wants “Excitement” but I typed in “Excite” and it marked me as wrong. No I’m gonna say I’m right, especially since the word in question can either be noun or する verb, so the English actually matches up.
With this script, I’m more at ease and the speed at which I do review is faster as well, since I don’t have to care about typo.
Others already said this multiple times, but I want to repeat it again. Check all the mistakes you do right after each review sessions, it will help you reduce future mistake on the same word. If its really bad, and you got it wrong multiple times, do extra review also.
I do Wanikani every single hour after I wake up so every other stack after the first only takes 5 minutes to do since they divide them into smaller stacks if you do them multiple times per day or every single hour that you’re awake
This way you could do Wanikani for 5 minutes per hour while at work
This is how it should work imo. It’s how @Raionus made his service work and it makes sense. If you get a word wrong x many times, it’s a sign it should be relearned.
I was able to install this with no problems. The retype is very helpful, but I especially appreciate the lightning mode as it saves a lot of time. Thank you again for showing me this!
Wow good luck. Sounds like a real challenge. Faced a mini version of this myself so I stopped lessons for a few days and only did reviews after acing 20 or 30 of my 50 mistakes.
I always do my recent mistakes first to prime myself with my worst cards. If I keep failing them in recent mistakes I pay closer attention to the mnemonics. That way I don’t burn myself with failing reviews but failure is part of the learning process and they’ll churn through the recent mistakes pile.
You got this. Do your reviews in chunks. Its not an impossible hole to dig out of and maybe you’ll come out reforged into v2 of yourself.
Don’t know enough of your situation to give advice (so why am I continuing typing?.. I guess the point of the sentence: I don’t know enough of your situation to be able to give as good advice as I’d like to(?)). But here are some thoughts.
Resetting a couple of levels have worked well for me when I’ve been overloaded with reviews (usually due to leaving WK for a while without turning on vacation mode). What worked for me when I reset was setting up a small WK-related goal. For example, if I’d reset now I could set up a goal like “get to level X within Y weeks” (you can also use chatgpt to check reasonable time frames). These small goals helped offset the attack on my motivation that the resetting did.
Some thoughts about your 1.,2.,3.
If you don’t want to reset, then fix a day (this Saturday, perhaps?) and keep your head just over water until that day. Then have tackling this pile as only goal for that day. Do 50 of them, have some coffee. Do 75, have some coffee. etc. (again, I have no idea about your life so just throwing ideas out).
Doing what you just did; talk about them, write about them, ask about them. Hopefully, typing this thread will help setting straight the examples you gave. For the others, make a thread at WK. Or take a writing block and write them down next to each other. Do you have someone near to you interested in Japanese? Or someone that can pretend to listen while you complain? Moan about how similar they are. “What’s up with air plane food“. Again, perhaps do this in conjunction with resetting or other means of slowing down the review pile.
I have no idea but an (admittedly very) ugly solution in case you continuously are making the same mistakes is to simply add all the synonyms that you mistakenly use (e.g. in your example, add “support”, “aid” and “assistance” to all of them). As always, just be careful to not overuse non optimal solutions like this.
