By the way, regardless of anything else, I want to say that it’s a misrepresentation of what was said. The example was about splitting effort. Both hypothetical learners would have the same amount of work, for 700 days. The difference was how the effort was spent. 400 WK + 300 immersion versus 700+0.
In terms of knowing kanji, it’s unclear to me which of those two learner would be better off. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, immersion alone will not teach you kanji efficiently, so I feel the 700+0 may actually have an edge.
In terms of learning Japanese as a whole, though, immersion is definitely key. So from that point of view, the first scenario sounds better.
Obviously, neither of those learners are done learning. The first one will need to focus more on kanji, probably doing a second pass of WK or of a similar program. The second one will need to get a lot of exposure and practice reading. Again, it’s unclear which of those will have an easier time.
Most of the studies I have seen in this thread focused on retention percentages and performance. I might have missed it (if so sorry about that), but I didn’t see results about quality of life/long term persistance. It doesn’t matter if a method is objectively better if someone doesn’t stick with it until the end. In the above example, the 400+300 learner may abuse just a bit too much, and be unable to immerse as they didn’t learn enough, and then quit. The 700+0 learner may be overwhelmed by their daily review count and quit. In both cases, that’s a loss.
I feel learners should experiment and find something that allows to keep them going. In the grand scheme of things, even 400 days lost isn’t that much. It took me 8 years to get to N1. I don’t think much would have changed if you made it 7 or 9.
That’s literally my guiding policy when it comes to learning Japanese/most things in general.
I know, for a fact, that I have not done this the “proper” way. I have a tendency to give up on things/ do something for a few months then quit, pretty easily. Learning Japanese is one of the only things where I haven’t, and I think it’s due to the fact that I let myself be lazy sometimes, I let myself “cheat” sometimes. Because this isn’t a race with specific rules or guidelines, it’s a personal marathon. And the only thing that matters is that you cross the finish line. Most people don’t.
But don’t ask me what the finish line is because there is none/different for every person.
I bounce between WK/BunPro/Kitsun and I haven’t found it a hassle. If fact, I prefer that I can isolate the stats and functions between the various learning platforms (but that is just me). Since Kitsun auto-generates vocab through Jisho, I have a full range of the vocab synonyms automatically while having input functionality. But I’m not creating a card for every entry meaning. For something like かかる・かける, you would need like ~40 cards! I’d rather be aware of them and then spend more time on native material for context outside SRS . Attaching an English or foreign definition to everything isn’t always necessary IMO, much like why N2/N1 grammar points are often easier to understand by Japanese explanation only.
Well, it’s neither a sin nor a crime, so nothing to admit
As you say WK is a tool. But since you did not specify, DO NOT use it on vocab or radicals/kanji that have already been gurued once. (at least that’s my advice)
I’ve also read of some lv60 who used it to make the load lighter between lv50 and 60. I.e they sent everything to apprentice 4 and then waited and saw which fell back on apprentice. Kind of an extreme measure…anyway what I’m saying is, Override can make WK more flexible. But never forget, until you actually burn it without Override crutches, you don’t really know it.
Tend to mainly use it when it’s a careless misspelling and press enter too quickly, like those “gyou” / “youu” type of answers. Also for words I never really use and misspell them in my daily life like 'thoroughness" or “Admonition” or “Overstepping one’s authority”. Can’t for the life of me spell them correctly the first time or written in the way wk wants me to.
For rendaku stuff, I keep it as a wrong answer.
A lot of people have said it already, but it’s good to get things wrong. At some point you get so angry at a word that you make it a point to remember it forever and ever. Or a trouble word on later on gets much easier since you have more experience with mnemonics and can now tie the meaning into something more memorable.
Only other time is when i’m not in the right frame of mind. Like it’s 5am (not a morning person at all) and have 100+ reviews to go through or at night with people at home interrupting my concentration.
I recently removed it. It’s somewhat embarassing how often I still try to hit Escape when I get something wrong. I’ve left it enabled on the mobile app, however, due to fat thumbs!
Honestly? We don’t all learn the same way.
I constantly use the “ignore” button, but I also focus while using it, so I don’t correct it mindlessly. I end up learning well the word by the time I get to Guru. There are some words I really can’t remember, but I think it would make more sense to put effort into learning them using a textbook like Genki.
“This flood was caused by you! It is because you did not believe in the holy Crabigator! It is because you didn’t do your kanji reviews. It’s because you used ignore scripts and reordering scripts and you sinned, sinned, sinned!” こういち said.
i agree with wk having too few reviews, with the interval length growing too quickly.
what wk could do about it is, offer a few presets, with “efficient” on one end of a scale, and “thorough” on the other.
wk does give you plenty of vocab in the hopes of getting to the “enough exposure” threshold, and i do believe it’s vital to put emphasis on this part of the studies, because mnemonics will vanish over time, and similar kanji will mesh together, and you’ll become dependent on context in order to read a word.
“burned” is a dangerous thing. people think they learned something “for good” if they burn something, while in reality, they either see it in the wild or forget it. you’ll even lose fluency in your mother tongue if you don’t use it for too long.
My philosophy is that it’s better to learn 80% of 1000 things in 6 months than to learn 100% of 500 things in the same span (you literally learn 800 things in the first scenario vs. 500 in the second)
So I use to the overrides to make WK go faster. I rarely use it on vocabulary unless it’s an typing error, but for level unlocks I use it freely, even though with the self-study script I do not need to use it that often.
For me it’s paramount to remember that WK will not teach me to read, it will only give me a base-level understanding of the kanji system and some context vocabulary. I do believe this point has been expounded upon by the creators of WK themselves on their podcast.
I will only gain literacy in Japanese the same way I gained it in English, by actually reading stuff.
I was more referencing the posited 400/700 problem, not really representing it in any way rather than saying that’s it’s a hypothetical anecdote (referring to the hypothetical, anecdotal numbers chosen. And I’ll try to prove that with math). I will also note, when first brought up by OP, the 300 days of immersion are supposedly gained by “abusing” (src: title and OP) the ignore button, and the days measure the time to attain WK level 60 (not just a general time allotment ratio, which you understood it as).
Also sorry for replying to you just to tell you that I think you misunderstood a separate post, then using your reply as a segway, ultimately giving you no discourse on the points you actually raised. You’re right that people need to experiment to find what works for them, I’m just concerned that the “ignoring actual mistakes” suggested in this thread (esp. before qualifying it heavily later) gives an actual, serious net loss, while others suggest there’s some kind of mysterious net gain. And that an attitude shift towards seeing WK downgrading your incorrect items as progress would mean it’ll be easier to stick with, without sacrificing possible memory consolidation. Time allotment for SRS and immersion will always be a per-learner, uncertain thing like you said. That said, I prefer to see WK ideally as a single-pass thing, as if it requires 2 passes it would have been better to have 1 pass with, say, extra 60d, 240d, 360d intervals and take 1 pass twice as long. Theoretically, you could keep adding SRS levels, 120d, 365d, 730d, 1460d, etc. But at the 730d point if you’ve forgotten the word, it’s because you’re not practising/immersing to the point where you hear/use enough common words or Japanese people never use it. So maybe an Anki/HouHou for words we want to know, but won’t encounter often enough. The 10,001th most frequent Japanese word being 君が代, I would want to know it, I will very rarely use it… come to think of it the 14,997th word is 売場, it’s N4. Core 10,000 is a lie, the everyday words don’t end… 100,000 reviews per day…
So you can see: getting to level 60, and obtaining that time by using the ignore button were big parts of the original premise of the 400/700 problem. I’m going to address the problem in it’s original form, the seperate issue of WK:Immersion time ratio is simply dependant on the user’s Japanese skill level.
WK’s Time vs Immersion’s Time
Firstly, I want to make the point that “WK’s Time vs Immersion’s Time” is not valid, or is misunderstood. Immersion is an obviously necessary component of learning a language once you can understand native writing/speech. As is the absorption of the language’s vocabulary (which is what we’re using WK/SRS for, at least until we can absorb Japanese like we do natively/have a sufficient base). It is true that we need to allot time to each of these.
The thing is: if we want to allot less time to WK, we can simply spend less time on WK. Take less lessons per day. Unlocking levels doesn’t matter, don’t rush to do that. Getting WK “completed” doesn’t matter. And so the time taken to Level 60 doesn’t matterbecause you can spend that time in immersion in the meantime. It is entirely unnecessary to avoid incorrect answers through ignoring them and reduce our learning efficacy on incorrect items, which it seems to me we keep assuming we must do to “save time” from being spent on WK rather than immersion. When we use the ignore script, we are reducing the time we put in for that item and so reducing our retention of that item. We’re taking less time to Level 60 because we’re deciding to not spend that time on items we’re having trouble with, we aren’t learning more from WK in less time. When we use ignore, and if we view the correct answer before it, we aren’t using active recall anymore, that’s why it’s a skipped level. We can get the same type of learning from reading the Kanji page instead of answering questions (and we really need that active recall memory bonus because it’s an item we find difficult).
To reverse the concept: I would liken abusing the button on WK to get more time for immersion akin to tearing a page out of a Japanese book and burning it (so we don’t have to read it) in order to get more time for WK.
Think of WK, instead of in terms of gamificated levels (which poorly reflect our actual learning), as a sheet. With 9 squares for each item, each corresponding to level from Apprentice 1 to Burned. When we use the ignore button (excluding typos), we don’t fill in that level (not exercising active recall). And so, if we ignore, say, 10% of overall items, we didn’t fill in 10% of the sheet. I’m trying to visualise that the user is removing WK’s content when they ignore an incorrect answer.
To surmise: WK Time vs Immersion time has been brought up a lot in this thread, but isn’t really relevant to the base question of “will abusing the ignore button bite me later?” The driving cause for it seems to be attaining Level 60 sooner by skipping content, which has no value.
400/700 Problem
Secondly: the numbers 400 and 700 are hypothetical anecdotes. They are numbers created by someone whose trying to make a point, and they therefore seem to support their argument. It has shaped our discourse, but we haven’t questioned those numbers. Now, I don’t have a maths degree, so there could be some issues due to the expanded interval… But also each of the days you spend is spent on individual items, so it’s linear?.. maybe this simple math forumula will do it? (Due to restarting an item means only re-doing the intervals up to it’s previous level, I believe the numbers might be even lower)
WK Total Time Taken = WK Total Time Taken For Perfect Human / (Accuracy%+Abuse%)
Time For A Perfect Human To Complete WK Honestly: 500 days.
My Real Accuracy: 85%
My Real Time To Properly Complete WK: 588.24 days.
Abuse Rate: 5% (a third of bad answers, so I guess this is being moderately strict with oneself?)
Altered Accuracy: 90%
My Time To Complete WK While Abusing Buttons: 555.55 days.
Time For A Perfect Human To Complete WK Honestly: 500 days.
My Real Accuracy: 85%
My Real Time To Properly Complete WK: 588.24 days.
Abuse Rate: 15% (take it, button)
Altered Accuracy: 100%
My Time To Complete WK While Abusing Buttons: 500 days.
So, my (possibly faulty, math major pls help) formula shows the 400/700 problem is blown out of proportion by approximately stonk (or the inverse of stonk, meme major pls help), 500/588 to 555/588 is more realistic. (An easy, fully accurate solution might just involve an actual, day-by-day simulation.)
Who’s Better Off: In order to get the 400/700… we need 400 days Perfect Human with 57.14% Accuracy and 100% abuse rate. Or 280 days Perfect Human with 40% accuracy and 50% abuse rate. That accuracy shows that you need to slow down on lessons and accept that WK will take a few years for you properly, learn slow but thorough. If you had those actual numbers, the ignore button is 100% the reason you’re not learning. You aren’t correcting half (or any!) of your mistakes, which you make 43-60% of the
time! 700 day person finished WK knowing all the WK things, abuser’s ability to say or define a WK thing correctly is a coin-flip or worse at 400 days meaning they must redo WK properly. And then it’ll be a total of 1,000 days spent when the 700 person was there 300 days ago. 400/700 is actually 1000/700, then.
Obviously the 400/700 thing isn’t 100% literal (it’s a hypothetical anecdote! A made-up statistic). But I have made an estimation as to why we’re not saving much time, and given an explanation as to why we’re losing something equal/greater to that time.
Summary
Because there’s no “free learning”, because Level 60 is an abstract WK metric that means absolutely nothing, because it’s the same constant learning rate regardless, it’s actually a choice between learning 100% in 588 days vs learning 85% in 500 days. The remaining 15% of items haven’t been learnt well (lack of active recall), and we will forget them much easier than the items we did properly. Obviously, immersion can help with this… assuming the word comes up in our reading, frequently enough and/or we use them in writing/speech (active recall). There are so many words that one should know, but will only come up very infrequently, so natural exposure would result in 20-40 years of constant Japanese being required to learn enough words to not have to duck out of a significant amount of conversations (or be babied through them). That’s why SRSing them can help us get literate in the meantime, and why skipping them makes no sense time-wise.
Abusing the button will save us around a month out of 1.5 years. And you’ll be losing the content (long-term memory consolidation from active recall) equal to that rate… but you’ll be Level 60 a month earlier.
Haven’t looked into your maths in detail but I think it’s flawed.
You cannot just divide the total perfect completion time by your real accuracy to get your real completion time. You need to factor in SRS interval times.
Actually if your accuracy is 90% on just the Kanji and radicals (vocabulary has no effect on WK level unlocks) you will level the same speed as if your accuracy was 100%, since 90% of kanji passed to Guru (SRS 5) is what is needed to advance a level. I myself will sometimes fail a kanji per level since I know it’s not going to keep me from unlocking the next level.
i.e. accuracy is capped at 90% for the interest of leveling speed, as long as you get wrong on the same kanji.
*actually I might be wrong since a wrong radical might compound the effect, as in you get a radical wrong, it delays the unlocking of a tier 2 kanji for that level, hence adding another delayed kanji on top of the ones you will get wrong due to having 90% accuracy.
You also need to factor which SRS level you get wrong at, and which particular kanji you get wrong.
(As I mentioned I assumed you get the same kanji wrong at each SRS interval).
I’ll run a simple example. Assume one level (lets say it has just one tier and not two like most WK levels) has 10 kanji. lets call them X1 to X10.
Assume 85% accuracy, this means you will get two wrong. Let them be X1 and X2 But at which SRS level? lets be generous and say you get all of them to SRS 4 and will only fail on SRS4.
I don’t know the time for SRS1 and 2 but I do know SRS3 is 24hours and SRS 4 is 48hours.
so you come to SRS4 and fail X1 and X2, they go back to SRS3. that will mean it will take 24hours for them to come back up. Assume you get them both right, then it will take another 48hours for them to come back at SRS4. You then pass them and they move to SRS5 (Guru), unlocking the level.
That added 3 days. And this is the mildest scenario. The assumptions I made at the beginning made is so that we will only be held back the minimum amount at getting something wrong at SRS 4.
So that would be 3 days * 60 = 180days added.
That’s 6months, not the 1.5months you came up with.
Now take a look at failing them at 85% on all 4 SRS level in apprentice.
SRS2 you might fail X1 and X2, passing X3:X10 to SRS2. But when the test for SRS4 for X3-X10 come up you also will fail 2 sending two of them back to SRS1. This will keep happening for tests in from SRS2 to SRS5.
See how it goes? You wrong answers will keep compounding.
Ofc your accuracy SHOULD go up the more you see them. so your real accuracy will not stay at 85%.
I see this all the time in my vocab since I don’t use self-study scripts or overrides (unless it’s a typo or I got careless), first reviews after a new batch of vocab always has low accuracy, eventually going up to 100% in a few days.
But thing is you will be delayed way more than 6months in a real life scenario with 85% accuracy on the kanji and radicals.
TL;DR
Having anything under 90% accuracy for kanji and radicals (might be 100% for radicals) at current level will delay you a hell of a lot than 45days… lol
Not using the ignore button or other scripts might be a better way to do WaniKani if your goal is to do WK in the best way.
There are endless things we do to enhance or compromise our learning, and everyone has their own combination. Saying the words out-loud when typing and repeating after the native speaker might also increase familiarity with the kanji/vocab (I do this). Writing words down in your notebook for each rep might further cement them in your mind, not to mention doing KaniWani and such.
Not using WaniKani and just reading a lot and consistently making sentence cards and drilling them might be even better, depending on the person.
Trying to analyze just how much progress is made or lost by incorporating the Ignore script is probably pointless because, as another commenter has stated, you’re not doing WK in a vacuum. And it’s highly dependent on how much you find yourself using the button and how much attention you’re paying to the stuff you use it on.
With diligence, consistency and a goal in mind, we’ll all get there, and anything that helps us to that end can be good. For me, the Ignore button makes my WK more enjoyable for reasons that might not make sense to others, and enjoying it more helps my consistency. I know that I have already learned a ton from WK, even if I could have learned some items better without using the button. For others, the Ignore button may be a very bad idea.
I agree!! I remember some guest speaking at a JET mid-year conference with a background in linguistics/cognitive studies and said that it takes the human brain something like 20 times to fully engrain to long-term memory, so there, science!
Well, since you replied to me, I’ll do the same.
First, about the maths, @damlurker already gave an answer but
Actually not, due to the way leveling works in WK. As mentioned, you need 90% kanji to move on to the next level. On most levels, that means you can only miss up to 3 kanji before being set back in your progress, by about 3 days.
Some users did simulations of average completion times for different accuracy. I could look it up, but I’m on my phone at the moment. However, I expect it to be highly non-linear, since a mistake can either do nothing or delay you a bunch. The difference between 400 and 700 is just 5 days per level. While it would be very unlikely to get such difference with a high accuracy, the probability is non zero.
Also, being delayed means that you may get in a situation where you do not have anymore lessons available, which is, for me, the worst part. I feel there would be a lot less incentive to use the ignore button if there was no walling between lessons (it’s possible to manually go check them, but that’s not ideal)
I feel the “ignore” approach (I may misrepresent it, though) has the advantage of getting you to see a lot of material faster, with less time spent on SRS daily. Based on my experience, you would indeed need more pass of SRS later on, but then you would come back much stronger from the exposure you got, so you’ll be able to focus on your weak points (and probably not need to ignore anything that time around, idk ).
It is probably slower overall, as you said, than doing a 1-pass perfect learning of joyo kanji, but I would have crashed and burned if I had attempted that, I think.
Well, I have more thoughts and random anecdotes about my learning, but I should stop rambling here.
You’re right that people need to experiment to find what works for them, I’m just concerned that the “ignoring actual mistakes” suggested in this thread (esp. before qualifying it heavily later) gives an actual, serious net loss, while others suggest there’s some kind of mysterious net gain. And that an attitude shift towards seeing WK downgrading your incorrect items as progress would mean it’ll be easier to stick with, without sacrificing possible memory consolidation. Time allotment for SRS and immersion will always be a per-learner, uncertain thing like you said. That said, I prefer to see WK ideally as a single-pass thing, as if it requires 2 passes it would have been better to have 1 pass with, say, extra 60d, 240d, 360d intervals and take 1 pass twice as long. Theoretically, you could keep adding SRS levels, 120d, 365d, 730d, 1460d, etc. But at the 730d point if you’ve forgotten the word, it’s because you’re not practising/immersing to the point where you hear/use enough common words or Japanese people never use it. So maybe an Anki/HouHou for words we want to know, but won’t encounter often enough. The 10,001th most frequent Japanese word being 君が代, I would want to know it, I will very rarely use it… come to think of it the 14,997th word is 売場, it’s N4. Core 10,000 is a lie, the everyday words don’t end… 100,000 reviews per day…
).