Hi all, I feel pretty melancholy writing this, and in all honesty I didn’t really need to write it, but I just wanted to share.
I started WaniKani in July 2023 and became obsessed pretty quickly. The formula of spaced repetition worked perfectly for the way I learned and I found it pretty cathartic speeding through reviews and being better than everyone else in my class at Kanji.
I was pretty dedicated to WaniKani, and was consistently levelling up in 7-14 days per level.
Eventually, I took a break and stopped doing my reviews for around 4 months. This happened during the school holidays and I kept telling myself I would do my reviews but I kept not doing it and they eventually piled up. I got up to 900 reviews until I eventually decided to do something about it, so I hopped on a call with a friend and spent around 3 hours slashing through my reviews. It felt so relieving to see that number at 0, and this was the first time I ever really struggled with my reviews.
I’d say about 8 more months went by with consistent study, until I started struggling with my reviews and getting the same items wrong over and over. It got to a point where my items were being moved down the SRS and I was GAINING apprentice items after a review session. It felt like I would never be able to do lessons at this rate as my review pile was already exponentially increasing even without doing lessons. (this happened at Level 30)
This led to me taking my second big break for multiple months and I came back to a review pile of 1,300. Every time I looked at this pile, I would go to do some reviews, determined to wittle away at the pile, though every time I would do a session of about 50 reviews they would pile back up almost immediately. It was extremely demotivating and I felt that unless I sat down for a whole day or something then I would never kill this review pile. And even after this, I would probably have so many apprentices that I had straight up forgotten and not be able to do lessons as I try to re-learn the items I had forgotten.
This brings us to the present day. My pile sits at 1,481 reviews, and I don’t think I’m gonna be able to do them. This hurts, because I love WaniKani and hold it dear to my heart. It’s been with me through so much, and I love the community. But, it might be time to say goodbye.
I don’t have a lifetime subscription, I’m instead on an annual subscription as I expected to finish WaniKani within two years when I first subscribed (oops). I don’t think I can justify paying for another year of WaniKani, so Level 30 might be where I stop, exactly half way to Level 60. It’s such a shame, I always wanted to get to Level 60 and I believed I could do it.
I’d be very surprised if anyone actually read this but if you did, I really thank you deeply. I thought it would be fitting to send my WaniKani journey off well with a post on the community forums that I held so dearly to me. I may stick around on the forums, I’m not 100% sure, but I’d like to say again: thank you WaniKani for everything <3