Hello, I am coming back to Wanikani after a while off, I’m level 17 now and it’s my goal to reach 30 by the end of the year. Now, I am rusty, and I’ve been some posts seeing some people restart, but I think doing that may kill or severely hamper my motivation. I feel like continuing without restarting would be less harmful to me than others, because I have had official Japanese language classes in University, and study abroad experience.
I am just going to muster on but I want to hear your opinions on restarting and it’s value. I feel like it would be nice after you hit 50 or 60 but right now seems too early.
I haven’t restarted, (mostly because I’m at level 5). But also, I feel like it would just cause a lot of stress/frusteration for me. I’d get antsy because I’ve already learned this, and I just want things to move faster!
That being said, it’s totally up to you. The only thing is that once you reset, you can’t come back. I know it’d really kill my motivation.
I had a break from WK and studying Japanese in general for about 2 years, and I also went way too fast and wasn’t that confident with a lot of the material the first time I went through WK anyway. So I decided to come back to WK and restart a few months ago. I believe there’s an option when doing lessons for you to say you already know items, but I never used it because I didn’t notice it until I’d already finished all the stuff that was really easy for me! haha
I guess it depends how long your break from studying was and how confident you are with the material in the first 16 levels of WK as to whether restarting is worth your while?
I took a break for 2 years when I was about level 6 or 7, and then again for about 6 months at level 8, and I didn’t restart either time. I’m a bit lower level than you, and it depends on how much you remember I guess, but the SRS kind of takes care of that. I didn’t set up vacation mode before I left so I had hundreds of reviews that I just slogged through until I started getting them right again.
At your level, restarting is going to put you back at least four months. You won’t be learning ANYTHING new during that time so that would basically be like wasting a quarter of a year because you were afraid to get sixty percent on your vocab reviews for like a week.
There’s never any point in restarting. Spaced repetition systems exist to filter out the information you need to review from the information you don’t. Just get the things you’re going to get wrong wrong and let it do its job.
Took a 175 day break (I just got lazy) at level 17. Same exact level you’re at.
I did what Raionus said and just bared with it, and I would recommend you do the same. Personally I don’t regret it at all and I think it was the wiser/more efficient choice.
I don’t have experience with either restarting, or coming back from enormous breaks, but it could be worthwhile to reset to say… . level 15 (or some level other than level 1), which would get rid of the items that you’ll have the most trouble with, and wouldn’t set you back as much as going back to level 1…
Whenever I came back from long breaks (2000+ reviews) I’d generally use the reorder script. If you order it by level and just ignore the most recent levels for a while then you can get similar results.
That’s exactly what I did. After coming back from a two-year break (at Level 17, even) I looked through the kanji in recent levels and found the point where I had decent recollection of most of the content. Then I ended up resetting to Level 16.
Since then I’ve had no troubles. I remember most of the older material better anyway from having more practice.