don’t despair @Anghi22 because although it’s getting harder to deal with the sheer amount, your brain will start making more and more connections that will save you from having to remember because you’ll start guessing instead.
total newbie to japanese here with no immersion and with only european languages knowledge.
i suffered badly in the first 20s but it’s levelling now that i’ve accepted burns hurt and add work! I’ m enjoying the increase in correct guesses. it’s far more satisfying than memorising.
Haha, I have a phonetic mnemonic for logic 論理 and reason 理論 too: ronri has (basically) the same first vowel sound as “logic”, and riron has the same first vowel sound as “reason”. In fact, riron and reason sound a bit similar.
The last-kanji-is-more-important thing might be more generally helpful, I admit.
It really sounds like you’re on the right track, then, and that this pain is… good pain? Like how your muscles have to ache after a really intense workout, and it won’t be an intense workout unless you keep forcing your body to lift heavier and heavier stuff. I usually tell my students that if they’re finding language easy, they aren’t learning much, and need to suffer a little more. I think I’m starting to see myself in the crabigator…
As for finding the stuff in each level, on the dashboard at the top right, click on “vocab” or “kanji” and then choose a level range. Then you can scroll through and see all the items by level! I just now realized I have a bit of an advantage here because my account is so ancient, so I have a ton of burns (2411… and only 118 enlightened…) and can see at a glance what’s burned and what’s active from these levels… but it will probably still give you an idea, like you can look through the list and see what’s immediately familiar and what isn’t.
It would be interesting to see data around the amount of people that get burned out at around 20-30.
I really didn’t crash and burn until 30. I sustained my reviews and didn’t progress for about 2 months. Then stopped completely for a month or two. Finally knocked out all my reviews and cumulatively have around 400 leeches in apprentice/guru/master.
I really regret going as fast as I did. WaniKani started to drain a ton of my brain power and I’d have to use my first morning coffee to power through reviews and new lessons everyday for about 1-2hrs.
My advice is just to really focus on the mnemonics for the items you have trouble with, slow down, start reading some native material (join a book club), and learn more vocab in the context of your grammar studies.
I don’t remember how funky your total kanji are 23 exactly, but one thing I would recommend is setting up the Visually Similar Kanji plugin which allows you instantly see and compare kanji with similar radicals. I find those are the ones I have the most trouble with.
When this started happening to me, I made sure to focus on doing the kanji lessons thoroughly. Once I started taking my time, reading the mnemonics and trying to absorb them, I was able to get back on track. You might want to try making your own mnemonics, if you aren’t already. Those tend to stick better than ones that are spoon fed.
Good luck!! Keep pushing through it, and you’ll get over the hump! Remember, it’s a marathon
I had the same issues around that level area but all I can recommend is to just continue what you’re doing. Around level 20 you start to see more and more similar looking kanji and as a result you sometimes have to relearn a kanji you thought you already knew, but actually your brain was just remembering the general shape.
As long as you keep doing your reviews every day, just keep an eye out for your apprentice items not getting too high and adjust your lesson speed accordingly. Taking a week off from lessons when you’re feeling a bit burned out is a great idea and I’ve done it several times to keep me from loosing motivation. Just use this time to study other Japanese resources and you will soon find motivation again, seeing all the kanji you already learned.
Just putting this out here to avoid making 20 replies to different comments.
First of all, thanks everyone for your encouragement! You really helped me pick up my morale(which was getting under the ground) and gave me the determination I needed
With that out of the way, it seems like after a few levels of struggling, I have finally managed to come to terms with the new workload, what with all the burns and stuff! I seem to have gotten back into my previous pace and in the past 3 days I’ve barely had any problem with my reviews and new lessons(most of my reviews were competed with 0 errors :D!).
That said, I’ll still try to restrain myself and only do a couple of new lessosn a day(maybe a max of 15 instead of 30/40) and hopefully I’ll manage to keep up the pace.
Thanks again for all of your kind words and encouragement, I guess that what I needed most was actually just some encouragement
I feel like given how often I’ve seen people joke about 栄光 and 光栄, it’s easy to forget there’s a whole bunch of these on WK that don’t see as much acknowledgement. Off the top of my heads, ones that haven’t been mentioned yet are 議会/会議 and 社会/会社.
There is a vacation mode, but I personally wouldn’t use it.
I feel like the hardest part comes from adding new stuff on top of what you’re already reviewing; stopping from doing new lessons and focusing solely on reviews would greatly help in my opinion
If you know that you have to go on break for a certain amount of time, vacation mode could be a solution to your problem. Of course your brain will still forget what you’ve learned, so it will just sugar coat the problem, your review accuracy will drop once your back on reviews.
I personally never used it. The worst I had was about 750 open reviews this September when I had a couple of weeks of not doing so many reviews each day (but I still did some every day). In the end I just took a sunday, sat down in the morning and did 200 or so, took a break, did another 200, etc. Even then, the next days will have a bunch of reviews and it takes time to actually get everything under control again.
Always remember to prioritize reviews over lessons. If you have open reviews, there is no reason to do any lessons.
