It gets me too, every time 
3 Likes
I tried that for a week but it didn’t do any miracle for me lol I guess it’s up to everyone to figure out the rythm that works with their brain 
I found that what works best with with me at the moment is to do a set of 5 lessons in the evening, ~1h before going to bed, then in the morning I do my reviews that include the 5 new items, then later in the morning i do a new set of 5 lessons.
10 lessons per day is the max my brain can take, unless there’s lots of easy vocab that I already knew 
4 Likes
Hi friends! Joined yesterday but durtled my introduction because durtles gonna durt.
This is my second time trying to get through wanikani, and so far the scenic route has treated me much better than the study-as-fast-as-possible route. My next level up will surpass my first WK attempt!
8 Likes
Welcome welcome! Enjoy the journey 
4 Likes
Made it to level 33!
Took a little over 13 days this time, which is about standard. I’m now on lesson 29 of MNN, so almost four chapters into the second book, which is cool!
I’ve been managing to keep up with reading every day, too (in both Spanish and Japanese), though Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling has been doing so many shows lately, I haven’t had the time to read any manga between my wrestling translations haha . I’ve reached the point where I’ve SRS’d enough wrestling vocab that I can actually read a fair amount of sentences in these show recaps without having to use Yomichan or another tool. Still adding dozens of new words from each show recap, though, so I still have a long way to go!
8 Likes
来た！来たんだぞ！やばいですね！
Sorry, I couldn’t resist
I feel like because of all the memeing around this vocab I already know it, and river+pork ateji composition is not a problem. So, thanks to all those who shared their fugu battle stories before!
In other news I leveled to 27, and today marks the day 10⁷⁷ since I’ve last done some grammar.
My day job is eating a lot of time, so I normally just manage my normal schedule of 9 lessons and then zeroing reviews. I do hope I can get myself to do some other JP-related work on weekends though!
Last, here’s another photo from the scenic route:
7 Likes
oh boy, oh geez, this is exactly why I have the double-check script lol. so i can add things like this as a synonym and not lose overall progress
5 Likes
Dinged to level 12!
Learning kanji that I’m seeing a lot in native materials, but never got as far to learn while still in school. An exciting place to be!
8 Likes
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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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!
8 Likes
This is a great name for it! I’ve done that a couple of times with recently burned items as well. I would run into it in the wild some where, know that I’ve learned it in WK but wasn’t confident, and want to know if I have any upcoming reviews for it. If it was in fact a burned it, it goes right back into Apprentice mode.
Reframing it as an old friend will help give myself some compassion, and not beat myself up for “forgetting”
5 Likes
I’m sure I have some of these, haha, but personally I’ve chosen to just let them go. I actually have an extension installed on Anki that imitates WK’s system of burning items (it automatically suspends a card once the next review interval reaches a year or more) to force me to eventually move on from my flash cards. Ideally, I’ll eventually reach a point where my vocab is good enough, I don’t have many cards left on any platform.
My logic is that once a flash card reaches that point, it’s best to let things get taken care of by the natural SRS that is reading. It’s not the end of the world if I forget a word and have to look it up again. That happens even in English, my native language 
4 Likes
This is a good point and I did consider it while making that post. But I decided I wanted to focus on how I’ve been using it as an alternative to filling in review-forecast gaps with new lessons. It’s not that I ‘have to’ or ‘need to’ remember all my burned items perfectly or anything like that. It’s just that I don’t want to get overloaded on new lessons, while at the same time I want to keep a steady flow of daily reviews to keep me in the habit of doing reviews daily. So I can use ‘old friends’ to fill those gaps instead.
2 Likes
I guess I’ve never had the problem of being in want of new material to fill review gaps, haha. My lesson schedule is so strictly regular, I never have any gaps in my review forecast . I mostly just want my time on WK and Anki to be useful to me, and I feel like once a word has spent long enough in SRS that I could remember it well enough to burn it, if I do have to refresh my memory of it again by looking it up, it’ll probably have a better chance of staying in my brain after that, and if not, well, maybe it’s not a word I really needed to memorize, haha
3 Likes
Made it to level 34 after just twelve days! Not a terribly exciting level, though I did finally get the chance to read a little bit of manga again because I caught up on the TJPW translations (until Golden Week… ). I’m also on lesson 30 in Minna no Nihongo, which is a nice milestone!
8 Likes
I vibe with this thread because I cannot understand how people do their levels in 7 days each 
That would not only imply a very high accuracy but more importantly the ability to catch reviews when they are due (in particular the 4h and 8h reviews are not very compatible with fulltime work schedules).
Got to 17 in 6 months, took a long break (a disgrace in the eyes of the crabigator), now I have reset to 11 and reached 12 after two weeks, soon to reach 13 after two more. Redemption arc! Ill durtle scenically with you all.
Instead of rushing Wanikani, Ill focus more on interweaving it with bunpro this time around for a more complete SRS learning method including grammar too. That should help adding a third pillar (reading/immerson) eventually. Even just learning the te-form now lets me use some of my WK knowledge in simple sentences!
9 Likes
Welcome, welcome! Happy to have you aboard.
If you happen to want to dip your toes into immersion a little bit now, I recommend checking out some level-0 graded readers. Even with a little grammar, based on your WK level, I think you’ll find these short stories approachable. Here’s some free ones online.
8 Likes
Still chugging through lvl27 for now, will probably level up in a couple days, making the level time a hefty ~20 days
Recently I’ve been feeling the difficulty of some enlighten and burn reviews so I had a day or two when I didn’t do my normal lesson batch. It did help with easing the reviews out, so that I don’t feel like getting slammed with the new ones on top of everything.
As a fun little experiment, I turned my phone to Japanese region for a while and when someone messaged me, for example, I saw “１件新しいメッセージ”。That was generally pretty fun, seeing even most apps switch to JP. I will say though, kana keyboard is a pain to use if you’re not accustomed to it. You can of course switch to romaji typing, luckily.
Also, here’s some side story, so stay awhile and listen, if you’d like
So I tried to put my WK knowledge to some use by reading an idol introduction from a franchise I follow.
Here it is raw:
Let’s break it down. First, I couldn’t quite get what “倍増” was about. And it’s the key to understanding the sentence, of course. So first I tried deepL, but:
Hmm…
So that fancy neural network still has ways to go, huh? Admittedly, now both Google TL and deepL can understand this word and its usage, so I guess I wasn’t the only fan trying to get those tools to help me. Gotta love ANNs for how they evolve.
The last part is about instantly, or really quickly, doubling, so the whole sentence becomes “With this, my follower count will instantly double.” So we got this.
The second sentence has two kanji from higher levels, so… close, but no cigar. Those are 匂 as in 匂い, and 致 from 致します. After solving that, there’s still the kinda weird “マニー”.
Yes, it’s the katakana rendition of money.
Finally, second sentence then becomes “It smells like, yup, it smells like money.”
Whew. It really is quite a bit that you have to wade through. Of course, it’s specific to this type of content, but still.
I guess I’ll check these out if time allows Thanks for sharing.
7 Likes
Another level up, and this time I am mainly pleased that after jumping all over the shop for more than a year I have completed two levels in the same amount of time (to within a few hours). After this morning I only have a couple of items left over from level 12, which should come available in the next day or so.
9 Likes
Came back and reset myself to level 0 since I was only level 2… I’m looking forward to leveling happily and slowly, letting everything stick instead of rushing along. I think this may be my kind of place!
11 Likes
Welcome, welcome. Take it nice and slow, and let plenty of fun Japanese things distract you. It all reinforces itself over time.
7 Likes