Enjoying the momentary bliss, knowing damn well that I’ll quit again next week for the third time in 6 months. The clownery.
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it takes effort but it’s rewarding. for me the thing that helped getting through was the knowledge that all i had to do was to just show up, every day (preferably more than just once a day) - the SRS (spaced repetition system) really works! ^____________^
頑張ってね！
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It really is rewarding, I just tend to spend whatever free time I have walking around the house whilst being anxious
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Well, if you’re gonna quit again (don’t quit, though) at least put it on vacation mode first so the reviews don’t pile up. 
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Do reviews on your phone, that way you can do both things at once 
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Physical activity/language learning/psychological distress - a triple threat!
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I wish I’d have thought of that. I got a bit burnt out and today I have 466 reviews (and I haven’t even started on my new level’s material).
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FlamingDurtles is what’s kept my 495 consecutive day review streak going, even though I prefer to do reviews at my laptop because typing on my small phone is a hassle. But the key is to never skip a day. Sometimes it’s a struggle to do all the reviews due for a given day, and then the next 3 or 4 days can be a struggle so I try not to let that happen.
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I just finished 800 reviews :)))) I think mine was just a month and a half backlog but geeeeez
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Hi
I just wanted to say that the more I look around, the more potatoes I find on this forum. Fascinating
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Best thing is to spread it out as much as possible. That way you don’t really dread it. 20 reviews here and there goes a long way. Doing more than 50 is getting sort of nonproductive. You’ll lose focus real fast and make stupid mistakes which makes the process frustrating. I have the priviliege to spend most of my time by the computer so I check every hour.
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I used to use flaming durltles but quickly grew frustrated with it because I couldn’t get the override script to properly work on it (and I make typos regularly).
I think the SRS system really works for young or otherwise gifted people. I’m neither at this point. There’s science behind SRS, but it’s not tuned for below-average people. I’m permanently stuck on level 8, and that has taken half a year of effort. When I started, I was in a much better place. There were still hopes and dreams. Now I’m depressed, exhausted, forgetful, hopeless, stuck, and permanently lonely and jobless. If SRS was just barely working for me when life was good, it can’t work at all now.
I’ve already forgotten half of what I burned, and too much of that was one last lucky guess. Maybe I should delete my progress and start over, so I can relearn the fundamentals that I lost.
I just recently worked through around 2800 reviews from about a 5 month break. Not sure if I’ll ever beat this day’s record:
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That’s odd, there’s an “undo” button on the review screen which I make liberal use of because my typing on my phone is so horrible. I don’t recall whether or not it’s there by default or I had to dig through FlaminDurtles massive pile of settings to enable it.
Speaking of options which there are a ton of on FD, the single most important one is the ability to set a lower number of reviews in a session. I set it to 10 so that I can do reviews in quick batches. If I look at a pile of 50 and think I have to get through all 50 on FD before I return to a laptop, then that’s a disincentive to do any. But if I can do a session of 10, I can sit down for 5 minutes and crank that out and go back to whatever else it was I was doing.
Oh wow, it really took some time to find. Maybe it’s hidden for a reason…
Advanced settings → Other advanced settings → Set special button behaviour → Undo
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Did I say something about a massive pile of settings? 
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If you’re stuck at level 8, a reset might make sense. Just make sure you show up for the reviews (at least once, ideally 2-3 times, a day). I do reviews in the morning, during lunch break, and then before going to bed. When i had lots of reviews I’d squeeze in another one right after work.
Some tips:
- as long as your review accuracy is above 80% you are good to learn more kanji. that’s the rule of the thumb. balance it against how much time and energy you have to learning new ones, of course.
- make use of the “add synonym” functionality for meaning - some of the words have been translated badly or don’t have enough synonyms, or they’d draw a distinction between kanji and the word. E.g. 雷 kanji has been translated as “thunder” but when you meet it as word, it’s “thunder” and “lightning” - why lighting is missing from the kanji i don’t know, so i just added that meaning to kanji, as life is fun enough already as it is). Consult jisho.org to see if you can add a better translation. For lots of radicals i’d just add “sticks” as a synonym because there was no value in remembering a glyph that isn’t really anything (esp. the wanikanji ones that aren’t true radicals)
- try to make sense out of a kanji when remembering it - some sort of story, and come up with your own interpretations where necessary. Quite often I outright reject the wanikani offered way to remember and come up with my personal story. Like for this kanji 誤 (WaniKani / Kanji / 誤 just noticed that at least firefox in this forum is using the chinese font not japanese, so make sure you click on the link). What it looks like to me is a human in a dress (you can sort of see the head, arms and legs), and the left side is “to say”. the meaning is “mistake”, so i’m just imagining a person going with their hands all like in the kanji and saying “yeah i made a mistake” dances like an egyptian. Not the wanikani catapult story. i’m not seeing any catapults there whatsoever. No matter the story, if you can make your own, you’ll have better time remembering it.
- this one helped me a lot - once you’ve done the review, at the summary screen go through the ones you got wrong and try to name the japanese reading and then the meaning. if you realise you can’t remember a specific kanji even though you saw the meaning/reading 5 seconds ago, go to jisho.org and look up the kanji there. jisho quite often has more synonyms you can add to the kanji so you can remember it better.
- don’t try to learn new stuff when stressed out or drunk. reviews work just fine when drunk (inebriation doesn’t affect recall but does affect forming new memories) but not so much when you’re stressed out.
- finally - don’t think about - just trust your brain - it will get better at this over time. i know it did for me, and i considered my memory just outright horrible (couldn’t remember a poem for the life of me) - as you progress you’ll gain confidence and with that you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t work
oh, also, track your progress. this site looks bit dingy but it does the job - https://www.wkstats.com/
but in the end managed to ramp it up to about a level in 20 days
And yeah, i don’t remember what happened on level 9, but i did get through it eventually (think i was doing something else in parallel at the time):
I just reset from lvl 20 to lvl 16 because I had a 2 months growth of 1100+ reviews. It feels reaaally good to reset a bit, and it wipes out all the more recent items which were shaky at best and would have just come back in an endless loop of leeches. Now I can focus on the previous levels until they are pretty solid, burn a bunch so they go to KaniWani, and then in weeks I’ll start lessons again : )
Good luck on your WK journey !