I admit it: I abuse the Override script ("ignore" button)

I’m also someone who came to WK as an N1 holder. If you want to know about the details, here’s my full story.

The tl;dr is that I have done something similar to your approach (albeit with anki rather than WK). It’s good enough to get to the point where you can read native content and pass the N1 test (well, assuming you study the other elements of Japanese as well, of course).
However, leeches and shaky memory will happen, and native content will do nothing for you. Here’s a recent example:
I came across the word つましい, which means frugal. There was no furigana but I knew the meaning, so I could keep reading just fine. I hazarded a guess at the reading, and went for 険しい (I’m not putting the reading here on purpose, so that people do not randomly get wrong stuff in their mind). Look! The okurigana fit! It must be right! Except it’s not. Good thing I checked, otherwise I would have had a wrong reading reinforced in my mind. And, of course, I also know what 険しい means, which adds insult to injury.

So, no, just going for native content isn’t the solution either. I wish it was, though, because it’s much more fun than studying.

With all that being said, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your method, and it’s basically what I have done the first time around. I didn’t use the ignore button on WK, but that’s because this time around my goal is different. I wish there was something similar to WK in a Japanese only version, but I couldn’t find anything.

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I find the ignore button a difficult beast to evaluate!

I have it on my phone. I honestly don’t abuse it but the issue for me is that knowing it is there makes me way more lackadaisical. I will often just speed through without any consideration because I know it’s there if I make a mistake!

Recently I have begun to realise how much more methodical, concentrated and eagle eyed I am when I input on my computer - which has no scripts. Subsequently I find I get to learn the kanji better without the script!

However, synonyms are an issue as is regional and national English variations. The english feels very Americanised. For example, I have gotten ゴミ箱 wrong about five times by putting in dustbin instead of garabage can. Recently I keep putting in weather report instead of weather forecast for 天気予報.

Then there are things like lively/liveliness, malice/malicious… never sure how I feel about ignoring mistakes in correct meaning but potentially incorrect application!

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Thanks for the insight - your story is a helpful reference point for me. I had actually read your thread before - I took away a lot from it.

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You know you can write your own synonyms as an answer? That way both dustbin and garbage can will be accepted as the right answer. ʕ•ٹ•ʔ

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I like having the ignore/override for when I make minor spelling errors, but to be perfectly honest, it’s mostly because of the radicals. Some of them are okay, but some of the radicals on WK also don’t actually exist or I know them as something else, so if I don’t remember exactly what it is WK wanted me to put for that, I just override and try again. Of course, I only just recently learned that I could throw synonyms onto those to bypass that, so I might start doing that instead.

I’m a little curious though (and not really sure if it was addressed already), but how come you don’t use something like Anki instead? Just personal preference? I feel like something like that would work better with your method.

speak for yourself

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imagine being so salty that someone uses a button in a way that you perceive as wrong that you cuss them out and ping them four times, this post made by letting people live their lives gang

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cool

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Wow, that was out of nowhere.

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There’s been some interesting discourse here that I enjoyed reading before it went down the toilet. I personally didn’t install the script until I was at my current level and my accuracy has gone down lol. I installed it because of typos I was making early on that was frustrating but otherwise, I’m strict because I know for myself in particular, I need the reinforcement and the mistakes actually help the kanji or word stick better in my mind.

As an aside, with the talk on synonyms, I’ve actually had answers not listed in WK that were accepted. Like 少ない is a few, not much, not many etc somewhere along those lines. I put in not small and it was accepted. I was very grateful lol cos it was the first time the word had come back up after learning it and I drew a total blank cos I only managed to review a full day later.

Also, probably a dumb question but where do you add your own synonyms?

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Go on the item page and click here:

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I’ve learned a lot today in the community heh. どうもありがとうございます.

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Which is a trap of its own. With some prior knowledge it’s easy to do things like ignoring the mnemonics, doing the lesson all at once, abusing the ignore script, and still progress quickly and feel good about it. But when reaching the hard part, where almost all kanji are new and the workload grow even more, the risk of shooting yourself in the foot and the risk of burnout increase a lot.

So, anyway, you will probably have to do some adjustments soon, and that will be a good time to see if using the ignore script is still a good strategy for you.

One thing though, that I didn’t realize until very late, is that every freaking kanji has like 3 or 4 other kanji looking extremely similar, just with a slightly different component here and there. For a very long time (like until level 20 or 30) most kanji look fairly unique, or maybe with one or two similar siblings max, so it’s still manageable, but after some point every single new kanji is just a variation of an old one. So, especially at level 11, I think it’s still easy to ignore left and right and feel like you know a kanji. But the real problem will maybe start at level 45, when you will learn yet another variation of a level 11 kanji and if your knowledge is a bit shaky, everything will start to melt in a big blur.

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Surprised i haven’t seen this answer yet:
I only use ignore somewhat liberally with items that are critical for level ups.

That is, current level apprentice radicals, or apprentice kanji when all radicals are guru’d.
Because I want max speed on WK and feel like i can deal with it (often at 0/0 lessons/reviews).

But in exchange, whenever i get those items wrong, i take a good long look at them, so it’s mostly like another review anyways.
Also, I try especially hard with those items, so i rarely get them wrong anyways.

Once i have guru’d these items, i don’t override my mistakes (other than typos), because they don’t matter for level ups, and you should let the SRS do its job to make sure you get it right in the future.

I do think that if you’re using ignore too liberally, you’re teaching your brain that it’s okay to make mistakes and that you don’t need to fix them, to some degree.

It’s the same with music, if you brush over mistakes in practice, you will do them again and again.
You actually have to physically repeat the correct versions so that they are more common than the mistakes.

though in the end, i don’t want to be too critical and i agree with OP that the impact is probably not too huge, especially if your accuracy is already high. Much more important anyways is to stick with it and keep doing your reviews. Still, i don’t think you’re doing yourself much of a favor.

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I do know about that… but I’m scared I might abuse it if I start using it :rofl:

I started noticing that recently. I got so many leeches out of nowhere, kanji that I presumably knew so well. Now I need another little mnemonic for it to differentiate between the new kanji and 3+ old ones that suddenly got all mixed up

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Yes, you’re almost definitely going to be screwed going into the later levels. So let’s talk about a neat little hack I found that might help.

One day I was in a really self-destructive mood and petulantly typing the wrong thing into the review box over and over again. When I finally collected myself and entered the right thing, the level that the review popped out at was way lower than I expected.

Later (using 括る) I experimentally verified that every time you I put in a wrong answer for a review on WK, it knocks the SRS ranking for that item down another notch.

So if you catch yourself cheating on a particular item during a review and you want to reset it, keep entering the wrong answer over and over again and eventually you’ll reset it all the way back to Apprentice 1. That way you can start anew and learn it properly.

Personally I don’t review without Double Check script running. I’m here to associate particular meanings with Japanese writing and sounds, not memorise WK’s glosses, so I’m lenient about this kind of Red Bar bait:

  • tip-of-tongue “damnit what is that word” situations where I type a whole description of the word out as a deliberate wrong answer to check what the answer is - those end up about a 50/50 pass
  • entering a word in adjective form when the gloss only covers noun BUT the Japanese word itself can be a な-adjective (or vice versa - nouns as verbs MAYBE if the noun is also a する verb)
  • synonyms - not just ballpark, proper honest to goodness synonyms
  • unlocalised spelling… a lot of the time this is perfect but just once in a while it’s not there and… argh…

I’m also lenient on myself about crappy data entry which comes from rushing through reviews - not checking the kanji properly, typos (especially when I copy down katakana/okurigana wrong or type くお instead of こう)… just impatience-driven point of performance type stuff. (I say the word aloud as I enter it to keep myself honest.)

Sometimes when i’m tired or stressed my brain gets jammed with a particular response I know is wrong, so I type the wrong response with the intent of hitting delete. Seeing Red Bar usually unjams my brain. I also have Double Check set to “exact match” mode so I don’t get the side benefit of the close enough match WK does. :slight_smile:

Actually, since this is the script abuse thread, I’d be interested to know if people consider the following practice to be “script abuse” or not…

Lately I’ve been using Ultimate Reorder to postpone reviews I get stuck on. If I see something that I know I know but it just won’t bloody come to me after a whole minute of making Dragonball Z noises at it, I force a reorder to make the problem review go away and come back later. Maybe something else along the way will jog my memory or maybe I just won’t remember it, but either way I postpone blockers so they’re not blocking my progress. (Especially when I’m in a hurry…)

For me it’s a way to manage frustration and confidence levels. Having a review sitting there in front of me and keeping me from getting to stuff I do know is just rotten. A run of missed answers kills my confidence pretty hard and increases the likelihood of checking out and messing up a bunch of reviews because I just want it to be over. This gets around that.

And it’s not unique. I skip around during school tests which don’t force me to complete answers in a prescribed order. I skip words I recognise but can’t recall if I’m reading so I can give my memory time. And of course if the memory situation hasn’t changed by the time the session is over, I dine on Red Bar like a grown-up - a much less stressed grown-up.

So - script abuse? Not script abuse? What do you think?

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How is your example different from using the ignorescript you mess with the order smne with double check script you get a second chance to answer correct