I finished up my reviews for the day and went to look at my heatmap and I noticed that there were forecasted reviews through april, but then nothing afterwards other than… some reviews in august? I was confused so I hovered over them and those days are when I’m going to get my first burns! I’m excited, wish me luck to stay committed to Wanikani to august and far beyond!
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Nice! Good luck! 
Ganba 
!!!
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noob question: I am still level 13, but why people get stick so much to this “burning” things?
Seems like some obsession when I read in some threads from some users. I just read the lessons and do reviews, isn’t this the basic and only thing to do?
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Yes, but the “burned” items remain burned hence you will not encounter them anymore in the reviews
if I keep forgetting the words coming sometimes on my reviews regularly, cant even imagine when i burn them and they disappear, 
it is the path to forget it forever when I see it again eventually in any wesbite lmao
it’s nice, being able to look into the future, and say: that is when the burning starts!, isn’t it?
having this sense of scale is one of the things which makes WK feel manageable. it’s going to take a long time, possibly years, but at the same time i can look at it and see that in half a year i’ll be burning the stuff i’m learning now. it feels good 
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Yep! It is nice to have that perspective. My first burn is on 29 July.
Think of it like this: when you come across a Guru word while reading it takes a little while to remember it again even after looking it up.
When you come across a burned word you forgot, you remember right away after looking it up. Oh, I know this one. And then you move on quickly.
That makes a big difference. 
Here’s a big reason:
When you start burning, the items stop coming up, which means they will no longer overwhelm you. When you get to a certain level, that makes a huge difference. It’s nice knowing that the 200+ reviews per day won’t last forever as items get kicked off the queue.
Besides the other replies, it shows how long you stuck with it, you might remember your trials with some of them, how you ended up remembering them…it’s an accomplishment, especially your first ones, which is why people might get so excited
Here you go, if you are interested, it makes it feel extra special. I remember when I did my first burns, it was so nice, my first one was the radical, person.
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I started burning items several months ago myself, and for me, it’s actually a bit of an uncomfortable feeling. When I see that “Burned” pop up, I immediately feel like I didn’t deserve it. Sometimes I had to think a few seconds about it, or I just don’t feel like it is yet truly burned in beyond forgetting. While it’s nice to have items removed from reviews so that the number of items doesn’t feel so daunting anymore, I also feel nervous about the idea that Wanikani will never show it to me again. Does anyone else feel this way?
One thing that does make me feel a bit better is that new vocab continues to crop up that uses old burned kanji. If that continues through all 60 levels, then that should help continue to reinforce burned items. Also, I suppose I’m unlikely to truly forget what a burned item means, or how it’s said, unless like, years pass without seeing it. I imagine it might take me a bit to remember, or someone might have to tell me what it is, but then I’ll be like “Oh right!” Duh!" So I probably won’t totally forget, but I still get nervous about the idea of never reviewing it again.
Maybe it would be nice if Wanikani had the option to randomly sprinkle burned items into reviews after you’ve burned it… spread out in such a way that each review might only have one or two burned items in it, so that they aren’t adding significantly to the total number.
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there’s several options for how to deal with that “i’m never seeing those items again” thing
the direct is to unburn them, apparently you can unburn items at will, and they go back into the SRS. and you can re-burn previously burnt items at any time
then there’s kamesame and kaniwani, both allow you do backwards wanikani. they’ll give you a word in english and you have to type it in japanese. they can link to your wanikani account, and you can e.g. only do the items which you have burned, or which are at least at a certain level
and then there’s what i think is the best option, which is to use your kanji knowledge and start reading ^^
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That’s a pretty common worry. I was the same too.
But like @Mrs_Diss mentioned, once you start reading you realize that even if you don’t remember something exactly, you’ll have enough of an idea that you’ll often move on rather than looking it up, especially since it’s in context.
I feel exactly the same. I never liked the whole ‘burn’ concept, and I’d rather have a much long er review time for ‘burnt’ items rather than removing them completely from the queue. After the reset I noticed that I forgot many of the ‘burnt’ items, and if reviewing them (randomly or at very long intervals) was an option I’d have never needed to reset in the first place.
This is what we call reading.
But seriously, if you never burned anything you’d never actually finish Wanikani since your review counts would just increase forever. It’s a means to an end and not the thing itself.
If you study Japanese as suggested by tofugu (kanji first and no grammar until level 10, reading later than that) you have already burnt and forgotten many kanji’s before you are able to consume even low level readers, which is the reason why I put aside wanikani and restarted it only after I learnt some grammar and was able to read graded readers. If I had to give advice based on my experience I’d suggest not to start wanikani before having some basic Japanese in place.
That being said, if the intervals kept growing after ‘burnt’ the number of daily reviews would not keep growing, in fact it would decrease anyway because the content is still finite and reviewed at increasingly long intervals.
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Yeah, I kind of disagree with Tofugu on that one.
I think that’s much better advice than Tofugu’s suggestion.
True, that was hyperbole on my part. But I don’t think I’d be able to keep up after a certain point if burns didn’t fall off the review schedule.
Plus, in my experience, it eventually becomes a moot point. I may have to occasionally look up items I’ve burned while reading, but it’s pretty much instant recall when I do.
Looking up a wholly new word takes longer to process and I’ll probably have to look it up again if it shows up again. A burned item I’ll probably look up for the first instance and then never again until I finish the material.
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I actually didn’t know Tofugu suggested kanji until level 10 and THEN grammar, but coincidentally, that’s what I’ve been planning to do. If you don’t know any vocab, then what’s the point of grammar, I figure? I don’t think that’s the traditional route, but it does make sense to me. Especially because I’ve been so busy on a massive project for the past year, with no intentions to start anything of that size again anytime soon. Wanikani has been an easy way for me to get a foothold on Japanese while also being busy. I expect to be done with the project around June or so, when I expect I"ll probably be Wanikani 10 or 11. I was then planning to take grammar more seriously and start reading stuff. Right now I just recognize certain kanji or vocab here and there, but can’t really make sense of a sentence without assistance. I started Wanikani in May last year, so I don’t think I’m at huge risk of actually forgetting anything burned yet, but I still get that uncomfortable feeling of worry about not being asked to review it again.