Is accuracy this low normal?

Exposition is absolutely key.

人間 is one my favorite examples, it seems so weird at first, but any fantasy anime or game will absolutely spam you with the word.

Another one is 現在, I never Really remembered it means “present”. Well put your decides to Japanese and you’ll see 現在オンライン all the time.

On another note, Google Maps in Japanese is Katakana madness, so good practice too.

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I don’t think it’s overlearning, either. I think what was meant with overlearning in this context, and what it usually refers to, is spending extra time with the SRS items; doing leech training, spending a lot of time with the specific items only etc. You are “overlearning” the material by more than the system expects and what should be necessary to learn them. That time could potentially be spent better for other areas of Japanese like immersion, grammar etc. That’s why it has a slight negative nuance.

It’s the same concept when people recommend to have your SRS accuracy around 80-90%, because otherwise efficiency drops rapidly. On the other hand, my mature card retention in Anki is only slightly above 70%, but it allows me to overall learn more words when I have room to add them more frequently without worrying about accuracy.

@shuly Feel you on the leeches. One of the main reasons I moved to Anki after reaching 60 for a while. I feel like the leech problem becomes worse the slower you go. I did WK in 1,5 years, so the leeches didn’t have time to accumulate as much, but someone going a lot slower will create quite a wall of leeches that can become insurmountable. Hard to add new lessons at that point.

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hmm… that’s interesting… when you say slower? do you mean slower between review cycles or slower as in lessons?

Overall I’m not missing the review windows for the App1-Guru1 / the G2+ vary a bit because of the timing… what I’ve found is that I forget them (like I’ve never seen them before when they hit G2/Master/Enl)…only way to manage that would be with reviews SOONER before you forget them (the whole point of SRS).

I’ve slowed down so that the leeches don’t pile up and take over 80+ percent of the reviews and this is unfortunately the pacing that I have settled into for now… why won’t WK build a freaking leech manager ugh!.. anyway… my pacing now is 40-45 days per level doing lessons and targeting next day reviews about 100 for new lessons…(limiting new lessons to 7-8 a day max) when I can do lessons.

after a long slow slog and trying all the scripts / tests / etc…nothing really worked so after doing what I could got enough data to average it out over time so that’s what I’ve got.

What would be helpful is more people with low accuracy and/or have to go slow to share their stats/experience … it would be more motivating to hear from those (recently there was someone yesterday 6 years)…that took 4-6 years to get to level 60. We all can’t go fast and not all of us are good at languages…I’ll take math, chemistry, and engineering any day of the year over languages!

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Sooo much this! My drop is not as dramatic as yours but clearly visible after Guru 1…

That’s why I’m really grateful for Anki where I can tune my SRS timings to give me accuracy I want (and not the other way around…).

I had my 4-year-anniversary last month, and I’m at level 52 now as you can see. :relaxed:

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To the OP, I’m going to disagree with some of what others have said. 75% is pretty low. While you shouldn’t stress out by comparing your recall rates to others, I think this is an indication that you’re not forming a strong enough mnemonic memory association.

For example I’m usually around 90% recall rate, but if I find myself dropping to 80% or lower then I spend some extra time visualizing each of my failed kanji at the end of the session, to solidify their stories. It almost always works to bring my recall rate back up the next time around.

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I just meant in general, as in the slower you take to reach lvl 60 and “complete” WK. Maybe it’s just that the later items don’t have enough time to become leeches and bog down the apprentice count. Another factor could be that the more one increases their immersion and reading time, the more leeches just tend to disappear.

In Anki I have a pretty strict leech policy, where I suspend them automatically after 5 fails (in review state, not learning). Unsuspending a year later, they often don’t bring any problems anymore, since I learned them elsewhere. So I usually don’t even bother with them, because there’s still so many more words to learn instead, which is more efficient.

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see when you say anki, do you mean the free ankiapp or the one that’s like twenty dollars?

so are you telling me to study the kanji and vocabulary after my reviews?

Just Anki https://apps.ankiweb.net/. It’s free on desktop, but I have bought the ios app, as well. Well worth the money.

AnkiApp is a knockoff riding on the branding of Anki. Doesn’t have nearly the feature set of Anki and is honestly just doing shady practice. Wouldn’t touch it with a ten feet pole.

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okay, thanks!

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Usually, people with an accuracy of over 95% are overlearning outside WK, like reading books, listening, studying, so they are constantly exposed to the kanji learned.

Can also be prior experience before starting WK. If someone already has experience with Japanese (from classes, or self study, or anything really) chances are that they already learned some kanji and vocab. Naturally, that will raise your accuracy, especially on the lower levels.

For the OP: I would not worry about your accuracy too much. Everyone learns at their own pace. But if you want to raise your accuracy, I’d suggest spending some extra time with any items that you failed after the review session. Go through their info, see whether the mnemonic works for you, and add notes or your own mnemonics if needed.

And if needed, cut down on the amount of new lessons you do on a day. Find a pace that works for you.

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There are multiple scripts built by WaniKani users for leech management.

“Item Inspector” developed by @prouleau is one of the top ones. (You can find the link in their bio or just do a search on the forum)

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You are on level 3 @Something1343 san. The mnemonics are still taking root in your brain. Unless you had prior learning experience with Japanese, it is normal to have low accuracy at the start. Once you do thousand of reviews, it will even out.

Good luck :+1:

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this is very kewl…we need more people like yourself that we know work really hard and do lots of reading etc…to show the realistic effort it takes to do WK not just the superstars that “I did it in a year” etc… :slight_smile:

doing reading (lately every day)… they don’t die easily

this would be a holy grail for WK…something I know many have asked for a suspend leech feature but WK still has yet to do anything like that (and scripts don’t provide that functionality)

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Just the ones you got wrong.

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