Lesson retention, Survey and Discussion

WaniKani
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I was unable to find another topic discussing but it’s a few questions I have that I want to get some feedback from others to get an idea of my progress and how it compares to others.

This stuff would mostly be your best guess, no need for any exact numbers and some questions may not apply to everyone. You can also add any other info you think can be important.

• When completing lessons do you normally only do a small amount of at a time like 5-10 a day or do you push though the lessons and do as many as you can.

• Do you try to keep your apprentice queue at a certain amount? Such as 100 items.

• Is it uncommon for lessons to pile up for you, having 42+ lessons at any given time that you feel can’t take on until you lower your apprentice items first?

• How confident are you when the first review pops up after the 4-hour mark that you will get most of the lessons you learned correct without self-study quiz or other tools? What about the 8-hour review?

• Do you aim to do the first review same day, such as do the lessons in the morning and be ready for the first review in 4 hours or do you complete the lessons in the afternoon or night and do the first review sometime the next day (12 hours plus later)?

• Is there anything you do to help you remember, such as anki, self-study quiz, flash cards, etc. in between review periods. Do you do any these on the go with your cellphone?

• What is your wkstats accuracy for readings and meanings?

• Have you gotten an answer wrong but said “oh ya that’s the right answer I knew that” and used the ignore script or another script to still mark it as correct?

I mostly want to hear from those with faster level up times, but any input would be useful. I’m not collecting any data to make a graph or write an essay or anything silly like that, I just want to get some info from others on their wanikani experience.

My reading accuracy has dropped to 70%, and after a bad review last night I had many items, 20ish or so, drop from guru or higher back to apprentice. Which is always annoying. I seem to be going slower then most others who do daily reviews so curious why. I’ve stayed away from using the reorder script but some reason I feel that wanikani is not giving me vocab words or well most of them until I level.

A couple days ago I had about 20 lessons, I guru some kanjis that put me to the next level but then my lessons almost jump 100 items of vocab that seem to come from nowhere. So currently have lots of level 6 vocab even though I’m on level 7.

I would be grateful for anyone to share their experiences, tips about keeping a high accuracy or anything else really.

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You’re gonna get mostly the same answers from level 60s, because just about every level 60 did it the same.

I did every kanji on level up. Then I spread the vocab over the next 7/8 days.

Nah, I ain’t scared of no reviews :sunglasses:
Although I legitimately don’t know why people do this.

I mean, you get 100+ lessons every time you level so, yeah I guess? Lessons got nothing to do with reviews so I do them whenever i want.

Like 90%, if I’m actually doing it 4 hours after I initially learned it. The longer I wait the lower my accuracy (which is normal tbh).

Yes, that’s pretty much required for leveling up quickly. It also improves accuracy which leads to less reviews in the future.

Nope

Like 90ish. Dunno my subscription ran out :cry:

Yee

Yeah because you have to guru kanji to unlock that kanji’s vocab. So whenever you level up you get a bunch of words + 30-35 kanji.

I dunno you’re probably going too slow. The longer you wait to learn the vocabulary connected with a kanji the weaker you’re going to be on that kanji. You have to make the connections quickly in order for stuff to stay in your brain long term.

Aside from that, a lot of people on this website adhere to the ‘slow and steady wins the race’ dogma yet I don’t see them actually ever finishing WK. There’s a difference between ‘slow and steady’ and just plain slow. Most of the fast people finish Wanikani because they commit to going fast and steady. The steady aspect is a lifestyle choice. It has nothing to do with your speed.

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• When completing lessons do you normally only do a small amount of at a time like 5-10 a day or do you push though the lessons and do as many as you can.

I do 12 a day, all at once. I may bump this to 16 soon.

• Do you try to keep your apprentice queue at a certain amount? Such as 100 items.

No because doing a set number of lessons each day covers this.

• Is it uncommon for lessons to pile up for you, having 42+ lessons at any given time that you feel can’t take on until you lower your apprentice items first?

I’ve paused lessons a few times when I felt overwhelmed, but I wouldn’t describe this a them piling up. Usually I let it sit at about 30 lessons when doing this (all radicals and kanji for the current level).

• How confident are you when the first review pops up after the 4-hour mark that you will get most of the lessons you learned correct without self-study quiz or other tools? What about the 8-hour review?

I’m usually confident that I’ll get most of them right. I sometimes miss one kanji (out of the four I learned) and I may miss a vocab if it didn’t logically follow from the kanji or if it had a weird reading. I’d guess that I get at least 75% on my 4 hour review the vast majority of the time, and often better than that.

• Do you aim to do the first review same day, such as do the lessons in the morning and be ready for the first review in 4 hours or do you complete the lessons in the afternoon or night and do the first review sometime the next day (12 hours plus later)?

Weekdays by 6pm so I can do the 4 hour review at 10pm before going to bed. Weekends by 10am so that I have the opportunity to do the 8 hour review before going to bed (for the ones I get right at the 4 hour review of course).

• Is there anything you do to help you remember, such as anki, self-study quiz, flash cards, etc. in between review periods. Do you do any these on the go with your cellphone?

No. I’ve tried a few times but never stuck with it.

• What is your wkstats accuracy for readings and meanings?

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• Have you gotten an answer wrong but said “oh ya that’s the right answer I knew that” and used the ignore script or another script to still mark it as correct?

No, not like that. If what I answered is a reasonable synonym I’ll sometimes mark myself right. Other times I’ll add the synonym for next time but let myself be marked wrong anyway so I get extra reviews. Under no circumstances do I ever mark myself right for being “close enough”, especially not with readings.

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This is some good info. I think the whole limiting my apprentice queue may be a major cause of this issue because I’m not getting lessons out the way to start the SRS process. While I have some leeches, most do level up easily and I remember without an issue. If those vocab or kanji just stay in the lesson queue that is no use. I might try to push that up higher.
One the reasons I don’t is because I leave doing reviews until later at night and getting though 100 plus reviews seems to suck. I need to figure out a better plan with that though.

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Maybe API v2 let’s unsubscribed users still get their data? Have you tried the WIP of the new version of the stats site?

https://wkstats.com:10001/progress/dashboard

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First off, I average 8 day levels.

  • I usually do 21 lessons a day (7 kanji/14 vocab is what I aim for). Radicals are just thrown in at the very start of a level, I don’t count them as a part of my daily lesson count.
  • I(try to) keep my apprentice count below 150, but it doesn’t always work. (Sitting at 170 right now, sometimes it drops down to 50, it all just depends)
  • 21 lessons a day is enough to get me down to 0 lessons once per level.
  • I usually feel good at the four hour mark, but the eight hour mark is when I usually first notice where any problem items are lurking. (And then the suffering starts.)
  • I usually do new lessons at 5pm, so that I know I’ll be awake for the four hour review session. But if I miss that, I’ll wait till right before bed and do my lessons then instead.
  • I’ve been using the self-study quiz daily lately. I have one quiz for recently missed items, and one for leeches. Dunno if it’s helping yet or not, because it’s only been about a week and a half ^^;
  • My accuracy levels are all in the lower to mid 90% area according to wkstats. But going by the percentages I get at the end of reviews (which is calculated differently), I’m probably more at a 80% accuracy.

All in all, I’ve found my groove. You’re still probably finding your own groove, so don’t sweat it overmuch. Experiment until you figure it out I guess!

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How cute, it knows that I’m not a level 3 :heart:
Unfortunately, it still doesn’t track any data from above level 3 though.

Yeah that’s probably a big issue. Longer sessions result in lower accuracy because you get tired and impatient. As far as I know, three is the best, but that’s hard for a lot of people to do. I usually two sessions, one after school and one later at night.

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:slightly_frowning_face:

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As @Raionus said, it’s very important to get into a consistent flow. But that doesn’t mean you have to level up near max speed. Find a pace that works for you.

I personally use the Lesson Filter script so do exactly 4 kanji and 8 vocab a day (when available). As with @Shadkat, I do all radicals right away. This approach lets me level up in 12-13 days.

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huh i havent head about the lesson fliter, ill check that out.
Well level up near max speed im not worried about, just I took 28 days this past level and the one before that was over 20 too, 20 days seems way too slow so I need to figure out a way to correct that.

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Logging in twice a day would probably fix that. There’s a bunch of SRS increments that are less than 24 hours, but you’re only logging in once every 24 hours so that’s messing up the timings. Words that you should theoretically be seeing twice a day are only getting seen once. That kind of thing. You could probably shave off like 5 days a level that way.

Anyway I know I’m kind of repeating myself at this point so I’ll can it :wink:

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I'm not a fast leveler, but since you said from anyone would be ok, here's my experience so far:

• When completing lessons do you normally only do a small amount of at a time like 5-10 a day or do you push though the lessons and do as many as you can.

  • In the past I was doing only 6 lessons a day, but now I want to go faster so that I can have more time to study other things before December 2019 JLPT, so I’m doing 12 lessons a day. I do 6 in the morning and 6 at night. (I’m currently planning to stop doing new lessons when I reach level 35.)

• Do you try to keep your apprentice queue at a certain amount? Such as 100 items.

  • I try to keep my apprentice count below 50, so occasionally I’ll skip a batch of lessons.

• Is it uncommon for lessons to pile up for you, having 42+ lessons at any given time that you feel can’t take on until you lower your apprentice items first?

  • I almost always have tons of lessons available, but knowing that I have a plan for steadily working through them makes it less bothersome. I leveled up to 15 recently and now I have 115 lessons - 79 vocab, 58 of which are still from level 14. I have the lesson ordering set to “Ascending level then subject”.

• Do you aim to do the first review same day, such as do the lessons in the morning and be ready for the first review in 4 hours or do you complete the lessons in the afternoon or night and do the first review sometime the next day (12 hours plus later)?

  • I only use WK twice a day: in the morning and then at night about 12 hours later. So about 12 hours until the first review.

• How confident are you when the first review pops up after the 4-hour mark that you will get most of the lessons you learned correct without self-study quiz or other tools? What about the 8-hour review?

  • Pretty confident. When I do the lessons I pay special attention to items that seem weird or hard to remember, so I just think about them more.

• Is there anything you do to help you remember, such as anki, self-study quiz, flash cards, etc. in between review periods. Do you do any these on the go with your cellphone?

  • No, nothing in particular. But I do think that exposing myself to Japanese in between reviews is helpful. Also, after reviews I make sure to doublecheck the items that I missed, and think about them during the day if I can.

• What is your wkstats accuracy for readings and meanings?

  • Radicals: R — M 96.84%
    Kanji: R 97.29% M 97.79%
    Vocabulary: R 98.14% M 97.77%
    (I did know a fair amount from previous classes that I had taken, so it might not be worth comparing if you’re starting Japanese from scratch. Now that I’m in the painfuls I’m encountering a lot more kanji that I hadn’t learned before, but even in pleasants there were some, and definitely a lot of new vocab.)

• Have you gotten an answer wrong but said “oh ya that’s the right answer I knew that” and used the ignore script or another script to still mark it as correct?

  • No, I’m not using any scripts. If I get a kanji or vocab meaning wrong, but I think I was close enough, I’ll look up the item somewhere else to see if I think it’s ok to add as a synonym.

• Anything else?

  • It’s only been a couple of weeks since I increased my pace, so we’ll see how it goes. I’m a little worried about long-term retention and ending up with more leeches.

.

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This is from when I did use WK, nowadays it’s all in anki

For the lessons I did all the ones critical to levelup (radicals and kanji) immediately, then spaced the vocab out evenly over the remaining days.

No

As said above, isn’t this inevitable due to how WK unlocks items to review?

I honestly don’t remember.

Yes. I did WK four times a day, lessons in the morning so that I could catch the 4 hour mark at lunch. You’d add several days to each level otherwise. (Not sure about retention rate though, anki has one day as the shortest interval, and that serms to work too…)

I don’t think I can check without an active subscription, but in anki I usually have about 85-90% percent correct across the board.

Not when it’s obviously wrong, but I also don’t hold myself to remembering the exact english wording WK or Jisho uses.

EDIT: I thought you said do I do all reviews in one go! Rewrote the answer.

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I reached level 60 in around 400 days.

  1. I usually did all available radicals/kanji right away with the reorder script, and 20 vocab during the rest of the time to spread the reviews out a bit (after I found out how WK works).
  2. I didn’t really pay attention to the apprentice count, but it was usually around 100, 160–180 during the fast levels. This showed me that 160 is far too much :wink:
  3. I never led the lessons pile up, once you start doing that the pile will only grow. I feel that the vocab is actually the most important part to remember the kanji.
  4. In the end I didn’t spend much time on the lessons, I used the self-study script to go through all kanji several times and just read up the ones that caused trouble. Then I had no issues until guru.
  5. I had the aim to reach apprentice 3 in the same day, but rarely made it.
  6. I worked a lot on the semantic-phonetic script, and looked up vocab in a dictionary, and saw lots of kanji “in the wild”. Your brain somehow marks items that are relevant to your life, SRS doesn’t count :slight_smile:
  7. Something like 96–97%, but I am abusing the ignore script :stuck_out_tongue:
  8. In order not to get stuck with 89% kanji I usually ignore kanji errors until guru, or new items where I have the feeling that any problem will solve itself. I just skip over the radicals.

I knew most content of WK to maybe level 20 already, so in the beginning it was easy and rewarding to see the kanji of words I knew. I think the most important part of WK is to have a good connection to the vocabulary, otherwise you will struggle. [Once you reach around level 20 it gets easier to learn more kanji because you have a good foundation, so the overall experience was fun :slight_smile:]

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When completing lessons do you normally only do a small amount of at a time like 5-10 a day or do you push though the lessons and do as many as you can.

I definitely don’t do them all at once anymore. My goal is usually to get through all kanji lessons by the time I guru radicals, buuuuut that usually doesn’t happen. Often off by a day or two, hence I’m doing ~9 day levels. I do radical lessons immediately on leveling up since there’s only a few. And previous-level vocabulary I try to be totally caught up on lesson-wise before I start guruing current-level kanji.

Do you try to keep your apprentice queue at a certain amount? Such as 100 items.

Yeah, roughly 100 or less. But I don’t enforce a strict limit, so I’ll go over it if I feel like I should be knocking down more lessons. When I go over it doesn’t usually stay over for too long so it’s not a big concern.

Is it uncommon for lessons to pile up for you, having 42+ lessons at any given time that you feel can’t take on until you lower your apprentice items first?

Since I try to power through vocabulary near the end of one level and the beginning of the next, I only have a lot of lessons if a lot of kanji guru at once and I level up without clearing out vocabulary lessons. So I usually have under 50 lessons, except when I’ve just leveled.

How confident are you when the first review pops up after the 4-hour mark that you will get most of the lessons you learned correct without self-study quiz or other tools? What about the 8-hour review? Do you aim to do the first review same day, such as do the lessons in the morning and be ready for the first review in 4 hours or do you complete the lessons in the afternoon or night and do the first review sometime the next day (12 hours plus later)?

It honestly depends on what time of day I did my lessons. I try not to do lessons at night because then I’ll forget them while asleep, but if I’m super busy at work and can’t do any lessons during the day, it’s sometimes unavoidable. So yeah I aim to do 1-2 rounds of reviews same day I do new lessons for an item, when it’s possible.

Is there anything you do to help you remember, such as anki, self-study quiz, flash cards, etc. in between review periods.

Only for kanji. I’ll expand the “See Apprentice Kanji Left” section on the dashboard and quiz myself on what I’ve unlocked a couple times a level, usually. That’s it, besides just using this stuff in the real world by reading manga, which is the whole goal for me.

What is your wkstats accuracy for readings and meanings?

There are a lot of factors to consider that make comparing raw WKStats percentages less than entirely useful. There are various ways to approach reviews that are about your own process and script choices and goals, and those do affect the numbers. But for what it’s worth I’m around 94-96% on radicals/vocab. That was higher in the earlier levels (high 90s), and is routinely lower now (low 90s), unsurprisingly.

Have you gotten an answer wrong but said “oh ya that’s the right answer I knew that” and used the ignore script or another script to still mark it as correct?

Sure! And this isn’t the heinous evil it’s sometimes made out to be either. Obviously doing it all the time defeats the purpose of studying, but I firmly believe that advancing at a steady clip and increasing the volume of kanji/words you’re exposed to is a lot more important than perfecting everything before moving on. Basically, I’ll take “confident about 90% of 1000 items” over “confident about 100% of 800 items” any day, no question. Precision is part of language acquisition, sure, but so is volume.

Use your own judgement about how close is close enough, and remember that WK definitions aren’t comprehensive and certainly aren’t The One Truth. Again none of this is to say that this should be the standard approach to seeing that flash of red, but there are definitely factors that go into making the most out of WK besides raw accuracy or strict adherence to WK’s definition of a correct answer.

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• When completing lessons do you normally only do a small amount of at a time like 5-10 a day or do you push though the lessons and do as many as you can.

I do all radicals in one sitting, all kanjis in another after doing the 4 hour review.
The vocab I do in sets of 10, try to do 3 sets a day to reach zero at least once per level.

• Do you try to keep your apprentice queue at a certain amount? Such as 100 items.

No, I only focus on getting the lessons spaced out to get many small reviews rather than all at once.

• Is it uncommon for lessons to pile up for you, having 42+ lessons at any given time that you feel can’t take on until you lower your apprentice items first?

Other than the level up bump I keep my lessons down. I failed at this over Christmas due to illness, yet kept doing the level up items while leaving vocab lessons behind. I was never able to recover from this and ended up giving up. I didn’t feel ready to get back in t it due to health issues so I kept leveling (using the joke script “never wrong”) for fun to level 42, stayed there a while before reseting when I felt better :wink:
I could have reset to around 20, where I actually was. I tried unburning from start at first, to make sure no leach had gotten through. But not having the level up timer pushing me I ended up unbruning too slowly, so did a full reset instead. This also wiped my stats clean, so well worth it =)

• How confident are you when the first review pops up after the 4-hour mark that you will get most of the lessons you learned correct without self-study quiz or other tools? What about the 8-hour review?

Well, I’m currently on items I know well, since repeating, so at the moment I’m at 99% :wink:
When on actually new items on the later levels, where I basically didn’t know any of the items beforehand, it was about 85% or so.

• Do you aim to do the first review same day, such as do the lessons in the morning and be ready for the first review in 4 hours or do you complete the lessons in the afternoon or night and do the first review sometime the next day (12 hours plus later)?

Especially with radicals and Kanji, yes. But I will sometimes do vocab lessons before bed, and the review first thing in the morning. I do reviews as soon as they come in if I’m not out and about. Since I’m home most of the times I get to do most items right away.

• Is there anything you do to help you remember, such as anki, self-study quiz, flash cards, etc. in between review periods. Do you do any these on the go with your cellphone?

Nah, I rely on the SRS.
I did print out flashcards made from WaniKani items, but ended up not using them more than once.

• What is your wkstats accuracy for readings and meanings?

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• Have you gotten an answer wrong but said “oh ya that’s the right answer I knew that” and used the ignore script or another script to still mark it as correct?

Mostly on synonyms and typos. And current level up items will be marked up no mater how bad I failed it, I’ll learn it better through vocab anyway (and once gurued it will be let down to apprentice if I fail it)
On this repeat round I don’t think I’ve marked up actually wrong items more than once, and that was a “brain fart” where I looked at the items and just -_- (mixed up four and west, and could clearly see it was the other, I just went too fast, didn’t look properly before answering)
Marking up too much is a slippery slope. On all non level up items (vocabs always and the other two after guru) I try to be strict. Even if I knew the correct answer after putting the wrong one. It is better to see it again a few times to make it sit better. I’m more strict on reading than meaning, as long as I feel what I put is an interchangeable synonym.

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Thanks god I am not the only one :smiley: “Yeah I do not know this kanji but if I let it fail I will spend 2 more days on this level doing nothing”

Sometimes you gotta abuse the ignore script even if its not ethnically correct x)

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I usually keep it between 100-130. Especially when going through vocab, I don’t mind the apprentice count being a bit higher with words that are easily remembered/deduced from their composition.

This does happen to me sometimes. The level I’m on now in particular didn’t smoothly go through my vocab like in the levels before. I didn’t manage to hit a 0/0 point this level, so I may have to tinker around with my method.

Depends on whether or not I’m familiar with the kanji already. Some things stick less than others. If I can remember it for the 4 hour mark, I’ll usually be okay on the 8 hour mark as well.

I tend to retain far better if learn new words first thing in the morning, ensuring I’ll hit the 4 hour and 8 hour review the same day. Really sticking to those SRS times as close as possible helps me.

While it’s probably easier to do a self study quiz, I often just use the Ultimate Timeline to look at newly learned kanji and quiz myself. If I really, really didn’t know the answer, I’ll sometimes fail an item in review because I’m worried that checking the correct answer while really not knowing it in between the SRS will muck up my retention. I hate doing WK on my phone, but very occasionally I’ll do that.

It seems to be in the low 90s.
wk%20stats

Nope. Only with a typo, or if I came up with what I’m sure is an acceptable synonym but getting the precise WK phrasing wrong.

Currently I’m levelling up every 7-8 days. Though I know level 10 is going to be slower, because I mucked up my vocab a bit, and I want that cleared out before going on to level 11.

I find reading to be very helpful, and I casually use some kanji learning/recognition phone apps on the side. That means quite a number of things that come up on WK are not wholly new to me, which seems to make me pick them up a bit quicker.

In the end, no two people will go through WK the same way. Finding a way to want to stick with it every single day and still enjoy it is important, I think. Good luck, Nyanpassu!

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Hi, here is my take! I have slowed down a lot though in the painful levels, because I was starting to feel overwhelmed around level 13.

I usually push through reviews. I like them to be 0 when I go to sleep. Sometimes when there are more than 50 or so I let them pile up during the day and do them on my laptop when I get home.

I do like to keep my apprentice pile low, lately. Fill them with lessons up to the high nineties. Sometimes I stop doing lessons until my apprentice pile is down to 0. Usually after just leveling up.

Since I study Japanese in other ways too, Usually there are items that I already recognize from elsewhere. So I get those right. Actual new items I sometimes get wrong 2 or 3 times in a row (I don’t do any extra studying for WaniKani items at all). At that time I sometimes remember to study the mnemonic better.

I do lessons whenever. No structure at all.

I think my accuracy in reviews is usually in the upper 90s, so without looking at wkstats I would guess my accuracy is up there overall?

I don’t use ignore script

Spreading your lessons will prevent many kanji from guru’ing at the same time. Which would unlock fewer new vocab at the same time. Then slowly do all those lessons as the level progresses. Keep track of when you are about to level up ( I check next review on the kanji pages). Make sure all lessons already in the queue are done by the time you guru that kanji that pushes you over 90%. If you notice that you might guru a lot of kanji at the same time, do fewer reviews, pause when you see a kanji guru nd do those lessons before moving on with the reviews. That should keep your lesson batch empty until you level up

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These are all helpful responses. I think I have figured out some things I need to change to do better in wanikani. Hope some other new users can read though all this and get some useful info.