FINALLY made it off of level 7! The welcome to level 7 email had a picture of the 7 Samurai and a warning that it might be a lot to take onâthey werenât wrong, this is my longest yet. But we continue! Iâm glad there are other folks durtling along⌠
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By the way, speaking of durtling along, Iâm at level 8 and have yet to burn a single item. When does burning usually start happening? Is it less frequent for the durtle team? 
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Usually around 6+ months from Guruing an item, I think. I donât remember the exact SRS spacing beyond Apprentice to Guru stages. After that it gets a little blurry.
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If you donât fail it, about 6 months after you did the lesson.
First the days it takes to Guru, 1 week in Guru 1, 2 weeks in Guru 2, 1 month in Master and 4 months in Enlightened. So even at minimum it is just under 6 months.
So it is less about what level, but how long ago you started.
I know the super fast speedrunners start burning around level 20.
With the speed you show here I would guess around level 12 maybe.
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only at level 16 I started burning items.
it varies I guess.
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Thank you, thatâs good to know! I will not expect it any time soon. 
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I started Burning towards the end of level 7, but itâs taken me between one and two months to level since level 4 
I always prioritize reviews over lessons.
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After getting distracted and taking a âhareâ nap from WK for a little while, I came back and had something like 400 reviews waiting for me. That can be really daunting if youâve never experienced it before, so I thought I would post a tip that I find very useful for How to Durtle the Scenic Route Along a Lovely Trail Up a Mountain 
(of Reviews 
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[Note: This technique may or may not be useful to everyone. It is useful to me because of some of my ADHD symptoms, such as âlosing track of timeâ, where I tell myself, âOh, Iâll just do X for 5 minutes and then Iâll get back to Y,â but then I find myself an hour later, still doing X, and having forgotten completely that I was supposed to do Y. If you donât have such kinds of symptoms, this technique may not seem to be useful to you. YMMV.]
This is something I learned how to do long ago when I was going way faster, and ended up getting overwhelmed with a ton of reviews after only a short break from WK. It will probably happen less often to those who are durtling the scenic route. But just in case it does happen, hereâs one specific trick I use that really helps me â and it doesnât use any special plugins or addons or userscripts or whatever, just a standard, built-in WK feature thatâs been there all along, and youâve possibly used a million times already:
The âPress the âWrap Upâ Button Immediately At The Beginning of A Review Sessionâ Trick
The âWrap Upâ button is normally used to âendâ a review session âgracefullyâ, so that you finish reviewing any review items youâve already started (such as the first half of a vocab or kanji item), but it limits the total number of remaining reviews to just 10, and it counts down from 10 to 0 as you finish up the session. Probably most of you already know this part.
The âtrickâ here is to simply press âWrap Upâ immediately at the beginning of a fresh review session, so that you will only end up reviewing just 10 items in the whole session. How does that help anything? Whatâs the point? Well, for me at least, it has the following benefits:
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Instead of thinking, âOMZ, I have 400+ items to review! Thatâll take forever! Iâll never get it done!â by going into the session knowing Iâm only going to be doing 10 reviews, I can think, âOkay, Iâm only going to do 10 reviews for now. I can always come back later and do 10 more if/when Iâm ready.â
Psychologically, this has a big effect for me. It drastically reduces the feeling of âoverwhelmâ and gives me a fixed limit â that is automatically enforced by the system; I donât have to remember to stop myself at 10 items (or 5 or 15 or whatever) â on how many reviews Iâm going to be doing.
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The number is small, only 10, which Iâve found is pretty much easily doable in maximum only a few minutes. I can pretty much âfit inâ a 10-item review session at any point in the day, with minimal interruption of anything else going on.
If even 10 items feels like too much, then, worse comes to worst, I can âmanuallyâ do a 1-item review session by simply stopping immediately after one item is passed. But even in this case, it is comforting for me to press âWrap Upâ immediately at the start, âjust in caseâ I happen to forget to stop myself after the first item. In that case, the system will still stop the session after at maximum 10 items, so I know I wonât âlose track of timeâ and end up doing a long review session (which can end up feeling âdrainingâ at the end, rather than ârewardingâ).
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The number is arbitrarily set by the WK system. It is 10 items. Not 5, not 15, not 20, or any other number. Just 10. I donât have to choose how many items it will be. It will always be 10. I donât have to carry the âburdenâ of making that choice; it is already made. Nice! One less thing to worry about; and when feeling âoverwhelmâ, eliminating things to worry about is a good thing.
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It is almost impossible to fail to finish a 10-item review session, even if you forget all of the items in the session. Eventually, you will remember them again, and be able to answer all 10 correctly, and finish the session. The session wonât automatically start adding more items that you canât remember! Youâll only have to deal with 10 items, which is doable.
Which means! That. It is basically 100% guaranteed that you will succeed at finishing this one, single, 10-item review session! This is very important for me, psychologically speaking, because the way to overcome a feeling that âI cannot succeed,â is by succeeding! And I can pretty much 100% guarantee that I can succeed at a 10-item review session.
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By succeeding at one review session (see #4), my mood shifts from pessimistic to optimistic. In fact, I will actually do a little cheer for myself, âYay! I did it!
â which, most surprising to me, actually does dramatically improve my mood, strange as it may sound at first. Itâs just fun and funny, and cheers me up.This makes me more likely to do another review session (probably still a 10-item review session, until I get near the top of that âmountainâ), to gain another âlittle successâ, celebrate that a bit more, improve my mood a bit more, and so onâŚ
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By at least doing one, tiny, 10-item review session every day (or, as frequently as I can), and by achieving a âlittle successâ pretty much every time, I tap into the brainâs evolutionary ability to develop habits, and so it becomes easier and easier to do a small, 10-item review every day. And eventually, that just becomes âthe new normalâ, and Iâm doing at least 10 items every day. (And of course, during this time, I am not doing any new lessons! Those wait until I get back to the top of the mountain, and the feeling of âoverwhelmâ is no longer there!) The point here is to âget into the habitâ of doing reviews every day (or, at least, on a regular basis, depending on your own pace of doing WK).
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Even though 10 review items is only a tiny tiny fraction of the total number of reviews I have stacked up into a âmountainâ â and even though more reviews keep getting added to that mountain pretty much every day, as per the SRS schedule â the fact that Iâm not doing any new lessons, and the fact that the SRS system eventually âthins outâ the rate of incoming reviews, by scheduling them at longer and longer intervals, guarantees that eventually, even just 10 reviews per day will end up outpacing the rate of incoming reviews, and the mountain will eventually start shrinking, and therefore will eventually whittle down to 0! That means that, this method, even with just 10 reviews a day, will also succeed at reaching the top of the mountain! Just, as the tortoise does, one step at a time, âslow and steady wins the raceâ â or maybe âslow and steady enjoys the paceâ!
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Because this method is guaranteed to work, and because it does not add to the overwhelm, but in fact reduces it, and because it is based on repeated âlittle successesâ that I can celebrate and actually gain joy out of, therefore this method is sustainable. It will not drive you crazy; it will drive you sane (again)! It will not bring instability, but rather will bring stability. Most of all, it will bring back the pleasure of enjoying learning Japanese, rather than âplaying the SRS gameâ, which after all is just supposed to be a means to an end (learning Japanese).
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Finally, because of #8, in fact you will eventually be able to do more than one 10-item session per day. And then youâll be able to start a session, but wait a bit before pressing âWrap Upâ, so that you end up doing say 15-ish items in a session, or 20-ish. Eventually 30-ish. Or whatever you feel comfortable with. You can go at your own pace, but it doesnât have to be artificially slowed down to only 10 items per day (or 10 items per week, or whatever your minimum pace might need to be).
Therefore, in fact, you will actually end up reaching the top of that mountain much faster than the analysis in #7 might suggest. Point #7 is just the âworst case scenarioâ (which, even being âworst caseâ, still ends up in success at the end!). But as you regain your âmomentumâ, and start doing more than 10 items per day, the mountain will start to shrink faster and faster. And also, you will find that your accuracy also increases once you start working through the items and start remembering them again, and getting them correct more and more often. This reduces the overall âchurnâ as you master the easier items and start to focus on what are typically called âleechesâ, but with this method you can also eliminate leeches, too, simply by reducing your overall review rate to a more sustainable one.
So, in fact, this method can restore your hope and optimism that you are making progress, and will succeed at learning Japanese kanji (and a bit of vocab). In this way, even if you get very behind on your reviews, with some patience and a âdurlting the scenic routeâ mindset, you can be sure that eventually, you will be able to get back on track.
I was at about 400 reviews in my âmountainâ roughly 2-3 weeks ago-ish. Now Iâm down to 115, which is absolutely within my âdoableâ range. The feeling of overwhelm has drastically reduced, and perhaps most importantly, Iâve gotten âback in the habitâ of doing WK reviews every day.
This particular âepisodeâ has indicated for me that even my recent âdurtling the scenic routeâ pace was actually still a little too fast for me, since it only took a few weeks of not doing WK for that mountain of 400+ to build up. So, I plan on keeping my pace even slower than before, so that Iâll be less likely to get this far behind again in the future.
Hopefully this technique can help others, and sorry for making such a long post. I didnât have time to make it shorter! 
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Random personal goal announcement:
Iâm going to try and give myself a purple level 60 circle for my birthday!
Birthday is February 22⌠Thatâs means I gotta get my average number of days to guru a level down to about 17.6 days. Thatâs about 10 lessons a day, with a tiny bit of leeway to miss a day here and thereâŚ
é ĺźľăăžăďź
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I love the Wrap Up function. I feel like itâs easily missed in the Help articles (or I was just overwhelmed taking in everything at the start of WK that I missed it). Iâm grateful I saw it mentioned in my early days of forum lurking.
I use it to chunk out any review sessions of 30 or more items. Helps break down the mental load, keeps my review streak going because Iâll at least have 10 done even if I donât do any more, and gives me the perception of more overall success because missing only 1 per review session feels better than missing more than 1 per review session (even if the total at the end of the day is the same result).
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I never knew what that button was for!!! Glad you posted some coping techniques.
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I decide to be happy about my 57 day review streak, because my WK history looks like this. But damn those couple of days in July and August without internet connectionâŚ
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That is a good streak! Especially considering the rest of it
I know Iâve been somewhat regular lately, but I wasnât all that regular in the beginning. Turns out Iâve kept a good streak! I should work to keep it if I can 
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I feel like recently ive been staying rather steady on my reviews but ⌠i kinda feel guilty ⌠i havent touched my lessons in probably a week. And when I do, I might steadily go through them for a few weeks. But eventually I slow down and have another week or so of solely reviews no new lessons. I feel like ive just been getting a little side tracked with other life related things. Learning nihongo is not my top priority but itâs still something I want to do. I guess Iâm just feeling a little down about having to shift it to a lower priority than I wish it was.
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I take time for only reviews too. I will do even less lessons than usually until after Christmas. As long as we prioritize reviews it wonât hurt our progress. Stopping to focus on what we have learned so far is not a bad thing 
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I do that too. I also might spend more time on a level, not leveling up to a next one, to clear all that current levelâs vocab or kanjis. Iâd like to do level 8 vocabulary while on level 8, instead of leveling up to 9 and still be working on mainly level 8 stuff.
And if I know Iâm still struggling with previous stuff, for me it kind of beats the purpose to go through new lessons.
Nothing to be guilty about focusing on reviews, really.
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Especially considering the rest of it. Your 2021 looks good My next yearâs goal 
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The way I manage this is to use the âAscending Level, Then Shuffleâ setting:
By using this setting (or you can use one of several various userscripts to achieve a similar or even more customized lesson ordering; but even just this basic setting works well for me), you can â instead of lumping lessons all together at one time â sprinkle your lesson in here and there. Perhaps sprinkle in a few lessons on a slow day (I also have my settings to do 5 lessons at a time, so itâs enough to be a bit challenging, helping me resist the urge to keep adding more lessons again and again, but at the same time, not too many (like say 10) so that adding lessons doesnât feel like a big burden).
Also, I limit myself to generally no more than about 5 or 10 lessons per day, and in fact if I have a lot of reviews upcoming for the next week, I might not do any lessons at all. The point here is to try to spread out your lessons so that the âgapsâ in your review queue get âfilled inâ while the âlumpsâ in your queue get âsmoothed outâ, so that in the end you get a pretty steady number of incoming reviews every day.
Another thing that helps âsmooth outâ your review queue is to try to limit your reviews to a certain number (give or take) every day. So, suppose you are currently getting about 100 reviews incoming, every day, and itâs getting overwhelming, but on the other hand, sometimes you have only 10 or 20 reviews, and those days are boring. The idea here is choose your âcomfortable limitâ of reviews per day. Letâs say you really only feel âin the zoneâ when you have about 30 reviews per day.
In that case, limit yourself to doing just 30 reviews a day, even if you have 100+ incoming on a particular day. Sure, you wonât always end up with 0 reviews at the end of the day, but just think of the extra reviews as âsaving up for a rainy dayâ.
And sure, if your average number of reviews per day is actually around 50 reviews on average, then by only doing 30 per day, your review pile will actually start growing and growing over time! But donât worry. Just keep plugging away at your comfortable pace of 30 per day. That pile of reviews might even grow quite big! But donât worry. That just shows that youâve been going too fast in the past. Just keep going at your comfortable pace. If you find 30 per days turns out to be actually slower than youâre really comfortable with, then you can bump it up to 35 or 40. Just go at your comfortable pace, whatever that is. If it turns out that even 30 is still feeling overwhelming, slow it down to 25 or 20 or whatever number feels comfortable to you. This is more like a marathon than a sprint. Or better yet, this is more like a pleasant stroll in the park than a marathon!
If you go at a steady, comfortable pace, resisting the urge to do a lot of reviews to chop down that big pile, then, over time, as the SRS starts to spread out the easier items more and more, then eventually that big pile of reviews will start to shrink, and eventually you will be able to get it back down to 0 each day.
Now! In the meantime, because youâve been doing roughly the same, consistent number of reviews each day, not doing them in lumps, they will be much more evenly and smoothly spread out in the SRS schedule, meaning that youâll be getting roughly the same number of items incoming every day, rather than 100 some days and 10 to 20 other days. It will just be roughly 30 per day (give or take).
And then this is where you start to sprinkle new lessons into your reviews when you have a slow review day. Or, even better yet, if you are watching your upcoming review schedule, and you spot a slow-day coming up, you can start to sprinkle say 5 reviews per day in the few days just before the slow day comes up. Then, since they are new items and get reviewed multiple times in a row early on, they will tend to fill in that up-coming slow day even before you get to it, smoothing out your whole schedule like this so that you really are getting about 30 or so reviews per day. The more you spread out your lessons to fill in gaps in upcoming reviews, the more evenly, smoothly spread out your whole SRS schedule becomes.
So, instead of doing all-reviews for a while, then a-bunch-of-lessons, then all-reviews, over and over, you will end up with a much more steady and enjoyable mixture of mostly-reviews with some sprinkles of new lessons more or less at a steady pace throughout the week. Itâs much more âpredictableâ, but at the same time more âvariedâ because youâre always getting some new items mixed in with old ones all the time.
And if 30 reviews per day is too slow for you, just do more (and âsprinkleâ in more lessons per day rather than just a few, but âsprinkleâ them, not âlumpâ them), or if itâs too fast, just do fewer. Just pick whatever pace you can sustain for weeks and months at a time without getting overwhelmed, but also without getting bored. Meanwhile, by steadily mixing in new lessons, youâre keeping the whole experience varied and interesting!
Anyway, thatâs how Iâm doing it, and it really works for me. If this idea doesnât suit you, no problem, itâs just an idea!
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Just to reiterate, thatâs where the âAscending Level, then Shuffleâ setting really helps to spread out vocab items so that youâre not left with a big pile of vocab at the end of every level, then a bile pile of lessons at the beginning of every level (with no steady supply of reviews to allow for the sprinkling technique to work). Be sure to check that setting out. I find it really nice.
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I actually would not recommend letting your review pile grow. Itâs fine if something comes up in your life and you have standing reviews for a day or two maybe, but if you perpetually have a pile of reviews that you arenât clearing, the SRS isnât working as intended, and youâre going to really struggle to remember things, because you wonât be able to hit the shorter review intervals on time for some items.
The way to hit the brakes in WK is to stop taking lessons, but keep doing your reviews every day. Usually the daily review workload drops significantly once your guru and apprentice item numbers go down. Youâll still have to deal with those reviews in the future, but it relieves the immediate pressure.
I think itâs best to control your speed primarily through keeping your number of daily lessons consistent, rather than restricting the amount of reviews you do daily (unless you took a few months off of WK entirely and have a large backlog youâre trying to get through). But if you do have periods of time where you start and stop taking lessons, as long as you arenât binging them, youâll probably be fine! It will result in a more uneven review workload, but if itâs within a doable range for you, then that works.
I would recommend trying to do at least 5 lessons a day, even if thatâs all you have energy for, just because itâs a good way to stay in the habit and keep working toward your eventual goal of learning Japanese. But if even that is too much, then prioritizing your reviews and leaving the lessons alone for a while is fine!
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