Is it normal to forget things from only 1-2 levels ago?

Just don’t 落ちる back down…

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But, but, it would be fun to 滑る back down!

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Or…

stair slide reverse

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As others have said, forgetting things is normal.

Just be careful as you can further along as leeches can become a real, tangible drag on your ability to move forward without frustration.

When you feel more comfortable with WK, I recommend exploring the dark world of user scripts. There are a LOT of really great, useful scripts. Just make sure you don’t abuse them as “cheating” at WK will be cheating you of your learning. :wink:

Of course it is normal! It is natural for the brain to lose the connections that are not used often. That is why SRSs exist: to bring elements up again and again, forcing the brain to maintain these connections.

Also, it appears that the best time to bring up a piece of information in SRS is the moment when you are starting to forget it, i.e. you still can recall but have to strain a bit. I think WK intervals are close enough but personally, I sometimes use WK vocab deck to study in parallel.

I’ve started working with this deck a month or two later than I started WK, so there is a lag and I get to review words from several levels ago. If you think that a shorter repetition interval would work better for you, you can try something similar!

However, mind that very short intervals are sub-optimal too and there are experimental results showing that in fact, after a rest, you are sometimes less likely to remember a piece of information if you repeated it all the time during practice - probably your brain feels no need to consolidate it into long-term memory in this case.

栄光 - Glory
光栄 - Honor

Since it’s a new kanji, I tend to focus on 栄 as I am less familiar with it. It goes alphabetically. Glory → Honor. If 栄 pops up first in this vocab, then it’s glory, if it’s second, it’s honor.

There are many other thing I’ve noticed after doing wanikani for so long. My favorite, if a verb ends in す, I find it usually involved someone or something else.

I think I may be one of the only people to remember 上げるthanks to the Hatsune Miku song. :joy:

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For me, I naturally just got 上げる. This is the Hatsune Miku song by the way that I am pretty sure is the one that you saw because her pitch just goes HIGHER HIGHER AND HIGHER (and it has 上げる in it). 続々上げるぞ! lol

I feel your pain, but believe it or not, getting it wrong A LOT is actually an important part of the process. It’s totally worth it.

I’ve noticed recently a number of words where I used to get the transivity wrong are now automatic. An SRS is like magic — your brain eventually just completely absorbs the correct usage pattern.

I’ve read of people here that gave up and just added both the transitive and intransitive meanings to each pair. If your goal is simply to decipher the basic meaning of some Japanese comics (no judgment intended) this is probably fine, but if your goal is to learn to speak the language intelligently, this is a very bad idea. Let the SRS program your brain to automatically remember the transitivity of each word.

In my opinion rote memorization with the SRS is better than even attempting to memorize a set of rules (and exceptions!). You don’t have time to think and apply rules when you’re speaking, it has to be automatic.

There are exceptions to these or any other rules. Tofugu has a terrific article about transitivity. I strongly agree with the section toward the end titled “AREN’T THERE SIMPLE PATTERNS TO MEMORIZE PAIRS?”.

In my opinion, their answer is definitive and correct: “No.”

Better by far to just memorize the forms like Japanese natives do themselves. WK aids this process immensely if you let it.

Hell, I still forget 上る often enough. I’ve got items in apprentice as far back as level 8 or 9. Some items are just like that. When you forget it, the SRS keeps teaching it, and eventually it’ll be solid. With so many items, getting some mixed up is natural (especially with the intransitive vs transitive stuff). You’ll get it.

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