I love this concept!!
Your words give me a framework to aim for with my review of the 6000-ish items I have now in Guru+
That 6000+number makes me both impressed and stressed. Since some I’ve come across lately, previously burned, I’m not recognizing… So I know I need to go back through…
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Recognising that you didn’t recognise it is also part of the process. Just by doing that you’ve made progress. There’s a huge amount of words in any given language. Like anything, you can let that weight hold you down, or you can embrace that you will never know every single word, which will set you free.
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I’m just stuck around level 40. I can’t really progress anymore, leeches are coming back and back again. They just don’t stick anymore.
And it’s because my Japanese is too bad, I can’t memorize the Kanji and words I rarely encounter in the wild.
One thing you CAN do (which is also cheating, and was inspired by YoGlev’s “fake pass”) and this is based on the premise that “frustration and burnout must be avoided at all costs in the study of Japanese, to keep from quitting”
Add a meaning that is that thing you “always put that is wrong” and add another meaning that is just some “Safe Word” that you will put into all cards that you “tried hard, but just couldn’t deal with”. Then you can advance, but you can search that SafeWord anytime to review your bad ones. Plus, anytime later, when your relationship to that said changed (like it pops up in your media consumption)… You can take the fake meanings out and knock it down to Apprentice and rebuild.
I keep a written record of the kanji, and what I’ve missed it up with, right next to each other with looks to the WK kanji card (that’s my over 600 pages long already study log in the forum here). It’s great, because it’s digitally searchable. It’s “my brain”, but with actually better “recall” L.O.L. (like my “hard drive”). I also jot down notes on the blog about whatever related to that, like words that use it that I should know, or book or video that I saw it in, and/or how it was used.
I think that’s it’s dangerous to write the same incorrect thing too many times, or your brain will associate that wrong thing strongly with a kanji. For this reason, if I don’t know something, I don’t appreciate…I go look it up immediately (on another screen) and take a moment to study “the correct thing”. That’s probably why I average one minute per review to clear WK reviews… Some people suggest to go hand-write the kanji/reading/meaning 10 times (in what I call their “punishment notebook”, that’s probably a great leech review). But I prefer something digitally searchable.
In retrospect, I probably should have used a weird processing file instead of WaniKani forums… they could nuke it all at any time!! fret, fret
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I would just like to give my two cents; I’d say to cut yourself some slack and not be too hard on yourself! I’d be down to betting you actually know much more than you think. It’s hard to evaluate our knowledge only from doing repetitive SRS reviews on WK, but once you go out and consume native material you’ll realize how much you’ve actually learned. Maybe you’d already been doing that.
I personally think that knowing reasonably well most items by the end of WK is better than stressing ourselves over and over again about 100% memorizing every aspect of some items. The latter may end up becoming a “perfectionist trap” as @Fryie mentioned above.
Good luck with the new cycle!! 頑張って！
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Hi, thanks for kind words. 100% agree. I think a big thing for many people that I don’t think has been mentioned in this thread yet is the SRS rabbit-hole. I’ve read horror stories of people who spend 2-4 hours a day doing SRS, to the point that they burn out before even touching native materials.
That said, speaking of native materials, yeah, my biggest reenforcement of kanji is native materials (a definite must for anyone learning, IMO). Personally, I’m a big fan of having a dedicated Kindle wired up to use the Amazon Japan store. Paired with a Japanese Kindle Unlimited account, I have near endless reading material from various levels. Manga is a bit tricky because other than reading, you can’t do much, but with light novels and standard novels, being able to highlight vocabulary and kanji to find definitions or to export them to Anki is just… a heavenly blessing.
In my case, when I mean I hadn’t really learned them, I was referencing how a lot of items got “burned”. After my previous reset, things got tricky (life stuff, unrelated to language learning). It resulted in a lot of unfocused study, etc. A good chunk of items got “burned”, when in reality I was using the “undo wrong answer” add-on (blanking on actual name), with the mindset of “eh, just this once won’t hurt” but resulting in a good majority getting burned that way. So when I decided to reset, it wasn’t so much a “ahhh, I don’t know every single kanji/vocab word” but more of a “Well, I’ll encounter these words in my regular reading, but hey, let’s reset to re-expose” (even though I run into most of them in the wild anyway. I’m not really in a rush to get to level 60, but I do enjoy the WK format, so using it as a supplementary kanji study tool fits my needs (even if it’s to review “earlier” stuff). I actually combine WK and the Kanji Study app (currently reviewing the N3 path there), and that combo (mixed with native materials) works really well for how my brain processes information. But that’s not true for everyone (of course).
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Nice!! Yes, I can totally understand where you were coming from with the reset. I definitely don’t think that resetting is intrinsically bad (I have also played with the idea before), but if one is too fixated on the SRS as a magic source of knowledge, then it has the potential to be less beneficial than expected.
You seem to be right on track to lots of productive learning, though! 
“Punishment notebook” made me laugh and brought up some memories from over 10 years ago. 
This is how I learned English way back in the day. I didn’t have SRS so I would write every single vocab enough times to tightly fill out 5 lines of A4 paper.
It’s borderline masochistic but it is fool-proof. Mainly because you can’t really be distracted while writing a word in your non-native and non-fluent (yet) language, so you end up paying almost full attention to it and many of the words actually stick (with the correct spelling, mind you).
Nowadays I realised there’s definitely more efficient ways to go about it, depending on your goals.
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Good luck!
I still don’t regret the decision to reset, I hope you will appreciate your reset the same way
Hello!
I’m back too after a couple years of pause.
I reset to level 3
I hope this time I can climb higher than before!
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A lot of great advice have been said. I just want to add that definition of “REALLY learn” a word is very tricky. Think about it this way. Word usually means different things in different contexts. Wanikani system requires only one so even if you pass all levels with 100% of correctness you will end up with only one meaning. Even if you memorise all Wanikani definition, you will encounter new meanings and contexts in a wild.
Resetting level my be a great idea. I just urge you to focus on actual Japanese material and use WK as reinforcement. Native material will cement your shaky knowledge.
Yeah, I’m the same. I was on a steady schedule until the pandemic hit and working from home messed everything up. I was somewhere in my early forties and at some point I decided that cutting things halfway would be good. I reset to level 20. Unfortunately I was just as lost there as I was before. About a month ago I reset to level 1, and I have been steady since then.
I hope that I keep it up. I am doing well so far, but it’s so early that I can’t compare it to the effort I put in before. Anyway, at this point I don’t have any regrets.
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