I’ve been at a loss lately with my kanjis and I’m having a hard time getting back on track. I’m on level 9 and I’ve been slacking off for about 6 months. Now I’m just stuck at nearly 1200 reviews.
What started off as a vacation (didn’t know about the vacation mode then) quickly turned into losing my routine and forgetting to do my daily lessons. Reviews quickly kept piling up and I tried to do some here and there but it felt like I really wasn’t getting much off my platter which felt overwhelming every time.
Recently, I felt somewhat of a success, after managing to sit down for a focused hour or two, and slowly getting around 80-100 off, but it climbs back up way to fast, and because I’m not in the routine yet, I forget one to two days and it’s back to where I started, which is super discouraging.
I remember that the addictive part which makes learning with WaniKani so successful is the dopamine rush each time you decimate the entire review stash and its down to 0. No matter if it’s at 7 or at 200 - you know you can do it and you do. Even when you get your dopamine hit 5 times a day after finishing just a few vocabs, it still feels just as good and at the same time it’s what makes the learning so effective. But it just hits …different… when you’ve down to 980 (especially because it also takes much longer and drains more energy after such a long break as you do tend to forget a lot and get quite a lot wrong). And just when you thought - ok, you can do it, you’re ready to tackle another batch for 2h - it’s climed back up to where you started before. Ugh…
I wish there was a “vacation light mode” but with the option of slowly but steadily doing your reviews and getting the number down, but so that new reviews don’t come back, so you can get it down completely. And then you switch it off and start “fresh”. Or is there such a way or workaround that I can somehow utilize which does just that (or maybe something similar)? Or can I somehow reduce the number of new reviews per day?
Do you have any tips, tricks, hacks, motivational ideas or anything else that can help me deal with this bulk? I need to find something or else I’m afraid this will become a losing battle.
And no, I’m totally not ready to reset everything. That was way to much work!!!
I’ve been there before, it’s not easy, here’s what worked for me:
Instead of making my goal reaching 0 open reviews, I tried to do 50-100 reviews per day and slowly over 2 months I was able to catch up. To make it easier, I sorted the reviews by Wanikani level using 3rd party tools, which made it feel like I was doing Wanikani again from 0 but much faster.
It’s important to take it slow because later those reviews that you do now will come back later, so if you do 50-100 you’ll get a bunch of them instead of hundreds at once.
The only suggestion I can give you is the n1 rule that God Koichi gave us all when we started Wanikani.
Do your reviews every day.
Nothing more, nothing less.
I know that you feel the need of some kind of motivation, but that comes and goes so you cannot count on that. You need a strict daily routine, and to build a routine you need discipline, that’s it.
Sorry for being a bit hard but I would like to not waste your precious free time doing something that wont bring you anywhere, unless you built a habit around it. 20 mins, 45 mins, 1 hour, 2 hours. You decide the time, but it has to be done every day. Good luck!
I haven’t tried this method myself so I can’t confirm if it works or not, but you can turn vacation mode off and on again. As in, turn in off to do reviews and turn it back on to stop them coming back immediately. Not the most effective for the long run but could help you get the pile down to 0.
There are no rules, limits…whatever regarding vacation mode.
You (@Floomiloo ) stated that you knock off a bunch of reviews but when you do another review, a new bunch is there wiping out the gains you just made! So this is what you do:
Do your reviews (knock off 50, 100, whatever).
Immediately turn on vacation mode to avoid any new reviews from piling up again.
When you’re ready, turn off vacation mode, wipe out another set of reviews and KEEP REPEATING this process.
Thus no new reviews will crop up to wipe out your gains and you’ll eventually get your reviews down to ZERO!!! Good luck
So, yes, I’ve done this, in fact I’m doing it right now, it WORKS!
You can try downloading the flaming durtles mobile app, and turn on anki mode for reviews. This lets you go way faster and do around 200 reviews in 10 minutes.
Damn! What an insane number of helpful responses in such a short time!!! I‘m astounded and really grateful (and also hopeful again)!
Okay, so the solution with turning vacation mode off and back on is absolutely simple and genius! So much so that I didn’t even consider that this might work. That’s exactly what I was looking for so thank you @DuoLingo & @RebBlue
@candus1 See, I was never quite sure if it just sometimes felt like that or if the reviews did come back faster and harder the more you reved up the. review gas last time. It’s motivating when you can set a tangible goal - aka give your best the next 2 weeks with at least 100 per day and then you reached your end goal. But when you see the next day that you’re back up ~70 and you’re now only down 30 from the day before even when you’ve put in a lot of elbow grease it suddenly becomes so meeeeeh…no fun… Also thanks for the link. I did check out a few similar threads but didn’t see this one. It really is full of good ideas and tricks.
@Cattivarlo I totally understand what you mean and where you’re coming from. It’s just that it doesn’t work s well for me as for others. One of the biggest challenges in my life is building and following routines. Also planning and keeping some sort of schedule. So most of it is either based on that what I truly want to do because it makes me happy, or what I absolutely need to do and can’t continue procrastinating on, or where I somehow manage to find a „workaround“.
That is what I meant in my thread - I understood how and why WaniKani was working so great and seamlessly for me.
I never had a routine, like for example: doing kanjis every morning for 30min (although yes, I did manage to inevitably establish a certain daily goal of logging on at least once per day, no matter how much I do. Usually my internal drive did the rest, so that during the process I automatically tried to do as much as I could anyway).
But what really worked were the regular mini dopamine rushes and sense of accomplishment I could provide myself with throughout the day. That also led to me sometimes logging on for 7-10 times a day just to see if I had new reviews and what’s totally awesome - made me actually switch from mindlessly opening and scrolling Instagram to actually doing something truly meaningful for myself.
And it absolutely felt addictive at times.
But just as easy it was to get in and stay in the game for a prolonged period of time it was to get out. At first I had a generally depressive, unproductive and low period and then came the vacation… and the reviews kept piling up faster than I could motivate myself to return. And now, when I actually do - it feels like no matter how much I time and energy I spend, it doesn’t really make that much of an impact.
Thus what worked for me so well before is now at a point that I can’t reach.
Long story short / TLDR I won’t be able to get into the routine until I tap into the flow state which made it actually work for me in the long run before.
Trust me, there are a BUNCH of WK users in here that deserve to be called a ‘genius.’ I’m NOT one of them. This is a really simple solution that I happened to be here when the problem came up. Forget the ‘geniuses’ I referred to above, there a TON of users out there that could have given you the same solution if they happened to have read this post before I did!
I was definitely there. I’ve actually been there more than I’d like to admit. Let’s just say I’ve had this account for over 10 years (Koichi pls just gift me the lifetime at this point). I’ve learned to change my philosophy. When I started I had this “speedrun” mindset which quickly consumed me and I burned out hard. There are two things you can do (I’ve done both)
If you truly don’t even remember anything you’re seeing any more, you might reset back to an earlier level. I know this sucks, every level is at least a couple of weeks, but the point is to learn and if you’re not learning then you will just be struggling and resent it. I was 25 at one point, and then a few resets later I was 9 again.
Portion reviews every day. I actually have this really weird “system” for myself where I have my bookmarks bar on my browser that’s right above the little progress bar. I say “once the bar hits this bookmark icon I will wrap up.” Idk why it works for me, but it does. When I wrap up, sometimes I go for round 2 and you hit that point even faster. You can decide how many portions you want to do any day. DO NOT DO NEW LESSONS. It will take a while if you let it, but as you clear reviews they will get pushed back and you will have less and less each day. You could probably clear it in the time you would have lost resetting even 1 level. My last word of advice for this method is to think long-term. If you do all 1600 reviews at once you may feel relieved, but a month from then you will suddenly have another mountain as a huge portion hits the next SRS stage.
Thank you for all of your suggestions. I’ve actually reset a few times in the past and I was disappointed because I lost all of my progress. I’m averaging around 80% in my reviews so far, and I’m happy with that after breaking for months. I’ve spent a lot of time in the lower levels, so a lot of it is actually starting to stick.
I was planning to do 200 reviews a day, but my mistakes come back at me so it’s more. I definitely won’t do any new lessons. My brain is full enough relearning everything I’ve forgotten at this point
How far back did you reset those few times? My first reset was from Level 21 to 7 which did sting a little. But since I took a break for 9 months, I felt like I needed that reset.
On my second and most recent break, I did a gradual reset. After 6 months away without vacation mode, I came back to WK just a month ago and had 1600+ reviews waiting for me like you. What worked for me this time was doing 100-200 reviews per day for about a week or two, prioritizing the items from the lower levels which were mostly enlightened if not mastered. You can do this without using any scripts anymore since it’s part of the settings now. So even if those items come back they’d mostly come back a few days or weeks later. Then when I got to 800 reviews mark, I started to reset one level per day going from level 20 to level 16. This also subtracted from the number of items I had to review and got me down to 0 reviews. And that’s the only time I started doing lessons. Not sure if you want to play around with that idea.
I think that the highest I’ve ever gotten on WaniKani was level twenty-two. I reset back to level one from there. Other times, I’ve reset back just a few levels. (I may have mixed this up. It was all a long time ago). Anyway, I think that I’m just going to aim for a couple hundred reviews a day. I really do remember a lot of it. I’m into the 1400’s now, and just scored 86% on a set of fifty reviews. My average will pick up in a couple of weeks Thank you for all of the suggestions
Are you doing anything else to practice/learn Japanese other than WK? I wasn’t before, that’s why I think I really failed before. Now I’m going through some VNs I loved in English (Ace Attorney, etc.) and it was an absolute struggle to get into them and start to learn the common vocab that is specific to those games, but once I got my bearings I actually really enjoyed playing them and I would start to recognize kanji in the game AS I was learning it on WK. The inverse was the same, I was recognizing new kanji on WK because I had learned vocab from the game and knew the pronunciation. I highly recommend supplementing learning on WK with something else.
Yes, I’m using the みんなの日本語 series of text books. I started with Genki, but switched partway through. I read Japanese readers (mostly Tadoku) and articles from Japanese learning sites like Watanoc. I also joined the Doraemon book club. I’ve played Animal Crossing in Japanese. The animals’ speeches were mostly too difficult to understand, but I could read all of the basic menus and still play. There are lot of repetative katakana words. Visual novels are a great idea, but I’d like to wait until my reading skills are higher.
It’s motivating when you can set a tangible goal - aka give your best the next 2 weeks with at least 100 per day and then you reached your end goal. But when you see the next day that you’re back up ~70 and you’re now only down 30 from the day before even when you’ve put in a lot of elbow grease it suddenly becomes so meeeeeh…no fun… 
