I realized something tonight that flipped my perspective.
To take a step back… I’ve always been intrigued by people with negative perspectives. No matter how good their lives are, they’ll find someone who has a slightly better life and turn this into a reason to hate their own life. As if the existence of something better makes anything less… bad.
Now: leeches. There’s an ubiquitous perspective around here that leeches are the edge case, the deviation from the norm. Tonight I realized that this perspective might be backwards. We’re all tackling the insane goal of learning 6000+ foreign words in a very short time period. The SRS timings are engineered such that if you’re able to get a word right 10 times in a row, you win. That is not normal. A word should be harder to learn than that. That (the non-leech case) is a bonus, a freebie, you got 運がいい (my favorite Japanese word, incidentally). Those leeches that you fail, and they take more than 10 tries? Those are the normal ones. If we wanted to ensure no leeches, we could add more SRS stages and tighten the intervals. But that would result in a lot more work overall.
I also see a lot of threads about how to “handle” leeches. My new opinion on this is: don’t worry about them. The SRS is already designed to make them go away after enough exposure. Just keep doing reviews, and the only thing you might need to consciously “do” with respect to leeches is learn to be ok with them and not get angry (yes I do know how hard this is, and I won’t claim to always practice what I’m preaching here).
I mostly agree, definitely with the sentiment.
What constitutes a leech is bit arbitrary, and I am fully happy for SRS to manage my learning when I make a few mistakes. My problem now is a quite large number of items that ping-pong up and down levels, without me remembering the correct reading or meaning a high enough proportion of the time. Those ones are frustrating and SRS is not really handling it for me so I need to check for “leeches” and try to learn them better.
I think I have a handful like that in the first 10 levels, a bit more in levels 10 to 20, and then after that…
I think it’s normal but without some extra study, WK is becoming inefficient for me.
Thoughts in very short form:
When you read you usually don’t look at new words 10 times in isolation to remember them. Come in and read with us :).
(and yes cheat that leech out with a user-script if it overstays its welcome and wait to fall upon it during your non SRS practice I swear it’ll stay in your head after. If something doesn’t stick it’s usually for a very good reason)
It comes down to semantics of how one wants to define “learned” and “leech”. What is important to remember is that recalling WK’s meaning and reading is a completely separate skill from reading Japanese; it is only a useful foothold to build up that skill, and as far as that goes, being able to recall a reading/meaning after four months is good enough
My opinion on leeches is even more extreme than yours. If something really does not stick, simply skip it. Man is better off learning five easy words and getting to read sooner than learning each and every word given to him. At the same time, being too trigger happy will have an even worse effect. Ideally, I wish WK had a “send to back” button…
I think you have a much more expansive definition of “leech” than most people, which is why your take on them doesn’t match the usual consensus.
Certainly “answered right 10 times in a row, never failed it” is unusual, but not being in that rare category doesn’t make it a leech for me. For example anki’s definition of a leech is one you failed eight times when it’s not in the “learning” state (which I guess roughly corresponds to “got out of Apprentice” in the WK setup).
I find most cards I SRS I don’t get right every time, but also I don’t get them wrong every time either. So leeches are also rare.
The problem with WK’s system is it isn’t designed to deal with leeches: it just leaves them in rotation along with the majority of cards that you may have a little trouble with but do eventually get down right.
With learning vocab it’s better I think to learn 80% of 2000 words than to learn 100% of 500 words, so I favour having a mechanism to filter out the small number of leeches. This is both because it’s an inefficient use of time, and also because clearly “just keep doing the same thing” isn’t working for those particular items, so pulling them out so you can rework how you’re trying to remember them and try something different is also useful.
I never bothered with leech focus. They’ll clear out on their own somehow and maybe the support structure to connect them to other data isn’t built out yet. It might sometime in the future but im not worried about it.
There is a lot of obsession about perfection and optimization, but the ultra optimization is not worth the effort usually. Ironically, Japanese tends to attract the engineer-software-analytical types and traps them in the quicksands of optimization.
Nevertheless, they ARE frustrating, at least they are if you notice them. Right now 真 and 実 are bothering me because I keep confusing them. Their sounds and meanings are pretty close, and that doesn’t help. Plus they get used together, which doesn’t help either. GRRR!
Emphasis added. And it’s interesting that the next comment below yours was also:
A number of the other comments rightfully address reading as being the real deal. When I reached level 20, the congratulations email urged me that it was time to start reading. I thought that was a bit early, but I did start a few levels later and am still slowly making progress in some stuff now.
I think it’s definitely a balancing act to find the right time to transition from pure hardcore SRS only to more reading based tasks. At the very beginning, all SRS all the time makes perfect sense. And at the very end, you will do no SRS. In the middle, you have to balance and shift. And maybe that’s one reason I don’t fully appreciate the pain of leeches yet. I imagine by the time I get to your level, I might change my mind. One thing I’ve noticed is that at higher levels, it becomes more difficult to semantically guess a meaning, especially when there are a few words that mean nearly the same thing. And I do think our brains retain these mapping better when we encounter them in context, which SRS does not have.
While it was not my intent to imply that everything outside of that rare category was a leech, I will admit that I was treading dangerously close to that false dichotomy with my wording and structure. Even worse, I’ll have to also admit my title was probably sensationalist on purpose.
The normal case is somewhere between leech and 運がいい. Leeches are by definition an edge case, but I guess I was just trying to frame them as “the cost of doing business” rather than a disaster.
That’s a really good point. It could track problem items and increasingly tighten the SRS variables on those, selectively. Or allow you to manually do something with them, e.g. push to back as somebody else suggested.
Clearly you’ve struck a nerve here because a lot of people are joining in on this conversation.
I find what you said in your original post very true and by coincidence I’ve had the same realisation literally yesterday.
Leech theory and management is one thing. And by and large I agree with all that has been said above, many words of wisdom shared. As for reading, what is said above is true, when you see a “leech” in the course of reading for enjoyment, it often turns into a piece of knowledge. I’d encourage at least 20 mins a day from now until forever.
But I think what you are saying that the way we frame things - i.e. mindset - is very important, and I agree with that thoroughly. Getting a card wrong whether one time or 8 times in a row should be celebrated, because that is the point of an SRS. It’s not even getting it “wrong”. It’s marking it as “this one is hard for my brain! Let’s review it again! More!” It can technically be a positive thing.
Sure, there’s a part of me that gets annoyed and I’m addressing that part of me directly. I am still getting better at this shift in mindset, same as you by the sounds of it. So: when I don’t remember something, I want to feel that it’s perfect. It’s good. It’s a chance to notice that I need to work on that card more by revising the mnemonic or writing/updating my own, comparing similar cards and reading the example sentences again. The whole point is to spend more time on those tricky items; the ones with multiple unrelated meanings; irregular readings; uncanny similarity to some other word. When I get one of those “wrong”, good! I get to study it some more. I get a chance to ace it. It doesn’t take me that long. When I see one of these cards I spend maybe a 30s to one minute thinking about it and revising it more. So if I see 10 of those a day… So what? I spend 10 minutes on those per day? No dramas. This post took me way longer than that, lol!!
And yes all of our brains want to be annoyed by leeches. It’s not dopamine inducing. But I can also choose to step one level higher and back in my own consciousness and reassign that moment into the category of “I am learning” and not “I am frustrated”. By making it positive and joyful I will improve my learning ability anyway.
Wow. I think you’ve made my point better than I did. Very well said! Agreed with all of it, especially about how hard it is to step back and rise above dopamine. Especially when my precious Smouldering Durtles app lives right next to Reddit and YouTube.
leeches are… items that make you doubt the efficacy of SRS. And SRS is… what takes time away from immersion and other kinds of studying.
(and take energy away from challenging formidable things. I wanna rest.)
My opinion is just like Uglan, recalling meaning and reading is a separate skill from reading (and listening). If something does not stick, skip it.
Nonetheless, is it really insane to learn 6000+ foreign words in a very short time period? How short time a period do you mean?
After all, skipping is tool to touch on more important things. The more beginner you are, the more of everything that feels important. And SRS isn’t always the best tool to learn everything. and mnemonics aren’t SRS. They are just tools that work well with SRS.
About negativity, it’s not just finding someone to be seen as better than yours, but also possibility that you are not getting to be able to read or listen in a reasonable timeframe… After that, it’s possible to do an activity that looks like learning a language the whole life, but never really touch practical things (or go into society).
I chose to be negative for the second case, pondering about my actions more.
(disclaimer, I know you’re a very regular reader so the following is much more a nuance to your point that a critique)
I agree with that on reading derived mining leeches but not on the WK ones. Because while you have made a real connection with a read one in native content the WK issued one doesn’t have the same emotional quality.
And “quantity” matter a lot when you have to get through a literal 10000 items for your first average novel (could be 7000 but the point still stands) losing time on a “few leeches” does cost a LOT of opportunity cost.
@Pancakes25 post amazingly sums the issues of WK leeches in the comic: it’s a time/efficiency trap.
I believe not remembering a word is normal and healthy. When you force a leech to appear, you’ll remember the wrong lesson: Not “I know this word, it means X”, but “I know that I’m always failing to remember this word”, which is not the piece of information you’d like to attach to a kanji or vocab item. And, like already stated (but I felt I wanted to add my 2c, anyway, to bump it), the best medicine is reading. Read a lot. Read stuff you’re interested in. As an example, I’m currently playing Fate/Stay Night, and the language the writer uses is poetic and partially obscure (fitting the setting). I just got Luna Translator and only added furigana, not a translation.
Yes I agree with you there. I was reflecting on this today and I realised something important. I actually let many leeches go. I study WK with Kakehashi on Anki mode for reading and meaning. For some leeches that annoy me, I simply mark them as correct to make them go away and have burned a few of these. I’ll learn these words (if they are important) eventually through other means.
But there are some words which I keep getting wrong which are not rare or unimportant. These include words that come up in my reading regularly. One example is 着く, 着ける and 着る. These are common and useful. In reading sometimes I get them right and sometimes I don’t. All are not burned despite me being on level 31. So if they come up in WK and I can’t get the reading right, for now I am marking them as “wrong” aka “more exposure please”.
There are some other words with random readings that I keep forgetting that haven’t come up in whatever I’m reading at the moment. No big deal, these ones I may choose to mark as correct to make them go away or maybe I’ll choose to mark them so they come back a lot.
In short, yes I want repeated exposure to frequent words that don’t get into my head, and no I don’t want that for words I deem less useful or common.
But either way I am enjoying having a very positive mindset all the time and enjoying my studies always always always no matter what. I love it all, I love it when it’s hard, when it’s easy, when it’s challenging, frustrating, when there are leeches, when I am reading, all of it.
I am definitely a fan of this. I also will try to change the way I “look up” a vocab meaning in my head. I usually start by trying to semantically decode it from the kanjis. But if that fails too many times in a row for a difficult word because the kanjis don’t really represent that meaning, then I’ll try to wire myself for that item to think about the reading first, and then create a mnemonic mapping from the reading to the meaning (this isn’t something WaniKani generally does AFAIK, they usually map from meaning to reading). I.e. I only use the kanji as an alphabet, rather than as a semantic system, for those difficult words. For kanjis that mean many different things, this strategy usually leads to better recall for the words containing those kanjis.
That seems like a lot of effort. Have you tried a sentence mining setup ?
(more unsolicited advice) disregard if unneeded
What works really well at scale for me is associating a sentence from reading practice to the vocab because you’ll have the whole sentence + surrounding context to act as a strong mnemonic.
Investing time in a mining SRS that integrate vocab like this is “free” reading practice and helps to bridge into more reading.
