Is SRS slowing us down?

Japanese Language
1

Hi,
this is a question that came to me today, and it’s not rhetoric. I’ve started to wonder about that as I was contemplating my review pile and how to start again.

I used SRS first for a about half of RTK, then started over and did 22 levels of WK and all the JPLT5 on Bunpro, so I guess I have at least some experience with SRS, both with self-rating your answer in Anki and the strict question modes on WK and Bunpro.

What occurred to me today is how deeply frustrating it can be to see the same words or kanji pop up that do not stick. While in Anki you could potentially sort them in another pile or suspend the card, WK does not have the option. Vocab is optional for progress, but it will still pop up in reviews. Again and again.

At this point, I’m starting to question the underlying philosophy, and it makes me contemplate my own goal. When I watch anime (subtitled) I notice that the stream of sounds increasingly breaks down into words or at least syllables. Every word I know helps, common constructs are recognized. All the vocab that really stuck from WK actually keeps getting recognized. If I had more vocab, I would probably do quite well in understanding the less complex sentences where they do not suddenly wax poetic or establish a concept.

So, for me, a goal would be to fill in my vocab, but if I think about doing this with SRS it just fills me with dread.

Fixing that may not be very hard. Some SRS is good, but it gets tiresome quick. And the question is what the goal is.

The goal of SRS in WK mode seems to be “It must stick at all cost.” I realize this is not my goal when learning vocab. My goal is for as much to stick as possible to fill out my vocab. Then I can still focus on the part that doesn’t as needed.

Do you see the difference?

I didn’t always have the same goal, so I don’t blame WK or Bunpro for doing what they do. I’d actually praise Bunpro for the fact I can, in the end, mix and match my lessons and at least learn what I think I truly need. WK is… less helpful. You can’t focus on kei-sei phonetic-semantic groups or learn a kanji and its component kanji when you need it. Bunpro can be a flexible tool if you need it to (and I guess I will need it to be that), but WK just… is a nag that sits in my mailbox and insists on learning kanji one way only. So, well, while WK was fun for a while and got me this far, I might set it aside for a while.

If my main goal is simply understanding Japanese, SRS as applied by these sites might not be my best option. A few repetitions, yes. But there’s this endless cycle of these things you don’t get or can’t quiz well on. Compare learning languages in school. Nobody needs you to score 100% on vocab because it’s not realistic. Rare is the student who would bang their head on a specific word by mere repetition until it’s no longer an issue.

The question is just where I invest my time. Right now I’m so burned out by my SRS treadmill, I’m doing nothing. I’m looking for a way to restart things, and WK’s pile of 1,100 reviews doesn’t help, nor do its review reminder emails. Nor do my 360 reviews on Bunpro.

I’ll certainly return to Bunpro in some shape or form, maybe reset altogether and then see. WK… I can see myself returning once I feel I need the completeness. Completeness isn’t wrong as such. But the return on investment at the moment is quite low and it makes me want to do less learning of Japanese - I mean, I want to do less learning of Japanese if I have to do it in WK. But I’m not burned out on Japanese, just on my approach.

Now, some online tool support would be nice… I wonder…

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Yes, I agree. It’s better to have a 90% recall on a thousand words than 100% recall on 500 words. A good SRS system automatically suspends leeches so you can either ignore them, or else go back to them knowing they need specific extra study.

Also very true. SRS works but it’s easy to overdo it and burn out. I tend to the view that SRS should be the side dish in my Japanese, not the main course – so I’m careful to limit how much I put in so it stays a small daily time investment.

I think my suggestion if you’re at WK level 23 and have done about half of RTK but are only N5 for grammar is that you’ve done enough kanji to be going on with. Maybe do some study of grammar in a non-SRS way (I’m not really sure SRS of grammar works very well, though that clearly varies between people) and more work on reading/listening/engaging with the language.

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I’m wondering whether it may not be an inherent ‘fault’ with the SRS concept or implementation, but rather with the possibility that a ‘naked SRS’ may not be the equivalent of eating a ‘balanced diet’.

That is, maybe the missing ingredient is some degree of ‘post-processing’, either suggested by or even enforced by the SRS when you repeatedly fail at recalling particular characters.

What do I mean by ‘post-processing’? Any of a series of follow-on activities that might help to cement the troublesome character into your memory. Right there when you’ve just failed at recalling it correctly. For example, stepping aside from the SRS to practice hand-writing the character and its definition a dozen times. Or looking it up on jpdb, or in other dictionaries, or seeing it used in context in a way that goes beyond the original example sentences.

If (since) that is not part of the SRS itself, perhaps it ought to be encouraged as "an exercise for the reader SRS ‘victim’.

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Yeah a better way to frame it would be “is WaniKani’s SRS implementation slowing us down?” and to that my answer would be a resounding “yes”. No undo, no handling of leeches, no way to fast-forward kanji and vocab you already know well etc…

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It’s better to have 90% recall on 30,000 words than 100% recall on 6,000 words. And so you know WaniKani isn’t that good for vocabularies.

However, it’s better to have good command on 1,000 kanji than equally bad command on 2,500.

Is WaniKani slowing you down? Comparing to what? It’s a personal matter if you have found something that works more efficiently, like the 2,000 kanji part. It’s not going to slow down than zero studying.

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True!
However, I feel zero motivation to do WK right now, so I better look for an alternative. :slight_smile:

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When I get the rare item I find frustrating and impossible to learn I just cheat by hovering over it with 10ten :upside_down_face:
Obviously relying on this more than once in a while harms the point of using WK though

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TBH I think this is far more of the issue than the nuances of WaniKani’s SRS - it seems like a lot of people get stuck in a loop of:

  1. Find a learning tool - works for awhile
  2. Motivation wanes
  3. “It must be because [tool] isn’t perfect for learning” (Which it isn’t - nothing is perfect)
  4. I need to find a better tool, GOTO 1.

And if you’ve already jumped from RTK to WaniKani, I feel like we’re at least looking at the second iteration of this loop.

Personally, I’d suggest trying to tweak your WK workflow before trying to ditch it and find a different tool - there’s a bunch of extensions out there and 3rd party apps that include various bits of functionality, like an “Undo” button or some way to get rid of certain words you don’t want to study (e.g. they’re leeches that you don’t care about).

Or yeah, maybe you can attack the motivation problem from a different angle, like @pm215 said you probably have a good baseline of kanji and if you’re tired of drilling kanji maybe it makes sense to focus on some other area (which may help motivate you if you start running into a lot of kanji that you don’t know).

I don’t think WK is perfect, but I think the more important thing is not letting “the perfect be the enemy of the good” as they say.

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Perfectly reasonably but personally I always try to transition from one thing to another over the course of a few months, not stop cold turkey to start something else. The reason is that, in my experience, the key to language learning is managing to build and maintain a routine. If you’re at level 23 in wanikani then presumably you have a routine that worked for you until now, don’t discard it until you’re sure that you’ve found a new routine that works well.

What you could do is keep doing only reviews on wanikani (the load should drop quickly without new lessons) while you experiment with other methods/supports/content/…

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One more thought:

When it comes to ‘changing your WK workflow’ that doesn’t necessarily mean ‘use extensions to modify it’s behavior’, it can also just mean ‘change how/when you use WK’ - do you do long dedicated sessions, or do you quick 5 minute bursts when you’ve got a few minutes to spare (a phone app helps for this) or do you multitask reviews?

Personally a lot of my reviews were done with WK on half my monitor and anime running on the other. (I did try to hold my lessons to a higher standard) Is that the ‘perfect’ way to do reviews? Obviously not - I’m sure if I had been giving the reviews my undivided attention my accuracy would have been higher… but it also made me much more interested in spending time on reviews than I otherwise may have if I forced myself to always have complete concentration. 10000 reviews that I actually want to do > 1000 ‘perfect’ reviews that I don’t actually ever do.

(But again, doesn’t have to be this specific strategy, I know some people who ‘bribe’ themselves for doing these kind of things by making sure they’re always doing it in their favorite chair, with their favorite blanket and drinking their favorite drink: whatever works!)

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I got super burned out by wanikani specifically and it caused me to stop all flashcards. I found that I would have these leeches that I simply couldn’t learn, and then after seeing them in a book or on tv only one or two times, I’d have them. And you could argue that my brain was primed to recognize them because of the SRS, but I was so miserable doing so many flashcards that I gave up studying at all. And ironically, when I gave up studying I started to improve a ton, just from watching shows I liked.

So I guess srs may be slowing you down, it may not be slowing others down, but if you want to continue making progress it’s crucial that you find something to do that you actually enjoy. For me, that will -never again- be flashcards.

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Personally the way I look at it is that SRS isn’t like a test in school - there’s no real stakes to whether you get things right or wrong, and that’s a lot of the point.

Rather it’s an engine to artificially create many, many encounters with words of the kind you naturally experience when reading. When reading you’ll encounter countless words any number of times over your whole lifetime, and for any given word there’ll be times where you grasp it instantly without thinking, times you forget momentarily what it means even though you did know it, times you have to look it up, times you misinterpret it and move on without realizing, etc. And SRS is like grinding in an RPG to churn out as many of those little encounters (with additional feedback) as possible to try to make up for the gap in reading experience that comes with just starting out.

And so personally I think the goal of SRS (even WaniKani SRS) isn’t “it must stick at all costs” but instead to make remembering the word successfully and not remembering the word successfully both desirable outcomes. If you get it right, cool that feels nice, and if you don’t, that’s another encounter that will come up again when the entire point of the system is to generate such encounters. And even leeches that you grow to dislike became hated rivals that then click when finally you encounter it in a natural setting and have it fresh in your memory enough to realize what was tripping you up the whole time.

I think it’s fair of course to feel frustrated with the system, especially if it seems to make things more frustrating than they need to be. And it does seem like different people have different levels of tolerance for SRS (and mine seems high). And when I was doing WaniKani I always had enough idle time to do all the reviews without feeling any friction about it. But at the end of the day personally I make peace with mistakes in SRS by remembering that it just means I’ll see one more word a few more times than otherwise, and learning to read means signing up to see millions of words innumerable times, so I think it’s not something to be too afraid of. I remember personally liking that WaniKani’s no takeback rigid approach encouraged me to embrace that mindset and not dwell on mistakes, even typos I made. I can’t do anything about it, so why worry when on the whole I can feel the progress I’m making still quite strongly.

I’ve found myself continuing with SRS via Anki and a voluminous self-mined jumble of a deck full of any and every obscure word I’ve come across, prefecture names, celebrity names, mon, etc. with that same lackadaisical mindset about it and it’s difficult to tell exactly how helpful it’s been but it seems at least not unhelpful, and every so often I still get that nice feeling of something clicking because encountering it in a book lined up with SRS reviews in the right way. And since SRS is something I do to fill time while drinking a morning coffee and watching a youtube video, it’s not like if I stopped I’d be replacing that with more actual reading, so hey.

Not sure if any of that is helpful exactly, but it’s the way I tend to look at it.

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Thanks, all of you, for giving me your input. :slightly_smiling_face:

I personally find that doing WK on anything but my main screen with a keyboard in front of me is not great (I did try). So I tend to come back to that, but that also means I have to make time specifically for that.

I didn’t mind quitting RTK cold turkey and still don’t, and in hindsight I find its approach quite flawed (but thankfully others picked up the idea). In comparison, I learned much more on WK that got me closer to learning Japanese, so I’m grateful for that.

I’ll still look for an alternative that isn’t as anal or inflexible about its SRS to do vocab. I feel drawn to vocab right now, then grammar as needed. I just can’t see myself doing WK and really enjoying it. So I finally put WK on vacation mode. I’ll still look up kanji here, as the kei-sei user script has no equal. :slight_smile:

I can relate to saying, hey, don’t take it so serious. It’s my way of seeing things, I know, but when mistakes constantly push more stuff in my face and add to my reviews, then I just don’t like that. Maintaining a constant workload is not easy on WK, and when too many reviews are for mistakes, I just feel like no progress is taking place. I’ll try to see if there’s another mode than WK for me or if, in the end, I’ll return to WK and go even slower.

When my 234 day streak broke on Bunpro, I realized that nothing was keeping me going besides the streak itself, momentum over motivation. I’d rather mix it up, but I haven’t quite found how. I’ll think about it. But when I watch anime, I still notice I love Japanese and have interest in learning it, so there is that.

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I’ll also chip in with one little thing that none of us purple-iconers want to hear.

Not paying for it anymore is one of the things sapping your motivation. There are studies to back this up. It also just makes sense, rationally. The desire to “complete” something that you know is going to continue to charge you money for is tangible.

Though, jumping ship for a reason like motivation is just going to leave you equally confused and frustrated when the next thing you try fizzles out, and especially so if it didn’t even help you as much as WK had.

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The desire to “complete” something that you know is going to continue to charge you money for is tangible.

Oh, I paid for it a year and a day ago, literally. It never affected my motivation.

In comparison, I signed up for Satori Reader a while ago and had to cancel the subscription because I didn’t feel motivated to do it. I was just still paying for it while getting nothing out of it.

As long as I felt WK was the thing getting me closer to my personal goal, motivation always returned. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I apologize that the way I had originally worded it ended up contradicting my original point I was trying to make, which was that it was one of the reasons for the drop in motivation (i.e., I was trying to say “and it doesn’t help that …” rather than “this is why …”).
Also, motivation is a fickle thing. You don’t even have to be cognizant of what they are when small things make a difference. But to not overstate the point, I’ll leave it at that, since it’s already gotten out of proportion.

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My personal opinion is that freely learning vocabulary and having it stick without knowing all common kanji is extremely difficult. And that’s why I like WaniKani. But that’s my experience.

Beyond that, SRS works for me as a person with poor short-term memory.

I also actually studied Japanese in university and got to post-Tobira levels of grammar, but went through personal turbulence during my last two years there and stopped using Anki, so I just crammed for tests and turned in translations and assignments on autopilot, then graduated and didn’t touch Japanese for maybe 3 years. I’ve forgotten some nuanced pieces of grammar but right now my hurdle is specifically kanji and vocabulary.

I have to say I’m let down because I somehow had the idea level 13 is where the kanji I don’t already know begin, but it turns out the real fun is closer to level 20. I think I might recognise or know way more kanji than I thought I did.

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I was exceedingly frustrated with the WK SRS madness, still no undo button and no leech management.

If you are happy with other resources use them! I wrote my level 60 post here:
https://community.wanikani.com/t/level-60-after-about-6-years/68664?u=shuly

I migrated away from wk at lvl44 after they broke scripts that made the site usable for the millionth time. Used kitsun to finish my journey. Info about how I managed the migration is there.

If SRS is burning you out, then yeah def don’t do so much. It will zap all your energy! Especially the stupid WK srs w/o some most basic features every other decent srs system has. Really if you export you can just use any thing but if you migrate to kitsun…

… they have a summary page. It’s only been 19 days (years now) :roll_eyes: no one knows anymore

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I recognize a lot of the thoughts expressed here for myself. I also stopped doing WK at around level 30 with a lot of frustrations towards the system. Moving to anki where I can control the format and loosen my approach a little compared to how I handled things with Wanikani. Right now, I still do SRS, lightly, but most of what really sticks is through conversations and media.

Considering increasing it a bit again in the new year to prep for JLPT N1 though.

There’s no either/or for me here. I tend to do better in memorization if I’ve seen words or kanji in actual use. But having made Japanese friends online, I can kind of force that natural use for things I’ve seen pop up in my SRS now. If all else fails, I can always just open up a Wikipedia page or read related news articles. Having spaced reminders past that point is simply helpful in a more conducive way than brute force cramming in information. For me, anyway.

That said, early on, that brute force cramming through a large WK workload was what was necessary to get a foothold in and get to that point of more natural learning and use.

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I’d agree with that. The problem is that being a beginner sucks and you have to do boring stuff to get to the point where you have enough skill to do the fun stuff. Cramming vocab with flashcards and doing textbook drills, etc. got my toe in the door, and wanikani was a crucial part of that.

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