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.
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?