:durtle_hello: Let's Durtle the Scenic Route 🐢

[wct]

Hey folks! Here’s another idea I’ve been trying out recently, which helps balance my review schedule to fill in gaps of upcoming reviews but without overloading myself with too many new lessons too quickly:

You might think of it in a ‘scenic route’ kind of way as, revisiting old friends. Basically, it amounts to ‘resurrecting’ previously-burned items that – despite being ‘burned’ – I came across later on in my ‘journey’ and just couldn’t remember. For example, I recently came across the word 音 during a grammar review on BunPro.jp, and I just couldn’t remember how to pronounce it as a vocabulary word (おと).

So I searched it up on WaniKani and found the pronunciation, which I had previously burned long ago. At the same time, I noticed that I had a day or two coming up in my WaniKani Review Forecast which only had a few reviews scheduled (for me, less then 15 or 20 makes for a ‘slow day’; I prefer around 30-ish per day).

So, seeing as 音 is a pretty common word, and seeing as I had a spot of ‘free time’ in my upcoming schedule, I decided to use the Resurrect button on the bottom of the item’s page to reset it back to Apprentice from Burned. And just for good measure, I also resurrected the related 音 kanji item, and a couple of related vocabulary items.

This has some nice advantages!

1. Normally, if I spot a slow day coming up in my review schedule, I’ll do a batch of new lessons, since that usually indicates that I’m running low on Apprentice and Guru items. But what if I’m already going a little too fast and want to slow things down a bit? Well, instead of filling in the schedule gap with something new to learn, why don’t I fill it in with something old that I’ve unfortunately forgotten? Reviewing resurrected items (revisiting old friends!) is much much less stressful, has a nice ‘familiar’ feeling, and eliminates any feeling of disappointment at having forgotten a so-called ‘burned’ item.

2. At the same time, it balances out my review schedule with some low-difficulty, low stress items, so that I always have at least a handful of items I can review each day, which helps me keep up the daily habit of doing WK reviews, but doesn’t overload me with too many new items at once.

3. It helps prevent me from ‘powering through’ levels too quickly, which would deny me the enjoyment of Durtling the Scenic Route! Of course I could power through, but I don’t need to, nor do I actually want to. So, taking the time to ‘revisit old friends’ I’ve forgotten seems like just as legitimate a way to spend my time learning Japanese as constantly always learning only new items!

4. Probably other advantages I can’t think of right now, but that’s plenty enough for this post!

So, I’ve recently been doing this for a few other words/kanji here and there that I’ve burned but now forgotten. For me, it’s a great alternative to only having the option to fill in gaps in my schedule with new lessons.

Hopefully this is a helpful idea for anyone else looking to fill in those gaps in your schedule to ‘smooth it out’ so you have roughly the same number of reviews per day. If you don’t yet feel ready to take on more new lessons, and you’ve recently discovered some ‘burned’ items (especially if they are common words!) that you just can’t remember, feel free to resurrect them and even resurrect their related vocabs, kanji, or even radicals. They’ll refresh your memory and on ‘the second burning’, I’m sure they will stick with you much longer, yet they won’t require much stress or effort to ‘get to know’, since you basically already know them! They’re just like old friends!