When you get an answer wrong, you shouldn’t have to wait months to try again. let me explain: I have been using Wanikani for 5 years now on and off, and I have to say that the reason I stopped for 2 years was because getting a review answer wrong is extremely punishing. I would learn a word, go on a streak of getting it correct over and over, then 2 months later get flooded with 600 reviews on one day and inevitably get a couple wrong. the words I got wrong I did not get better at, and even though I am at level 15 and I still have level 5 and 6 words floating around in my review pool. It’s a vicious cycle: I learn a word, I frequently get it correct, then months later forget it and it gets de-levelled back to apprentice, and the cycle starts again. I understand this means that I need more practice with the word, but that also means the current practice is insufficient. Now, when a word I dont remember appears in my review, I would rather cheat and study it again after rather than get it wrong and wait a long time to try again. Here’s my proposal: Wait times for reviews should only occur once. If you get a word wrong, you can get it de-leveled, that’s fine. but you shouldn’t have to WAIT AGAIN to level it up. a word is in master tier and I get it wrong? give me rapid lessons to re-learn it before I can level it up. Wanikani is meant to be a self-study tool, and in a self-study tool you should not be incentivized to cheat. I believe that changing this mechanic would be better for users, returning the onus of practice to us rather than when the program deems you need it. anyone else have thoughts on this? PS: I understand that there is a “lets study the ones you got wrong” section, but it doesn’t stick when you forget the word and don’t have to try again for another 2 months.

Well this is an unsual request… more often than not people want less not more reviews :grin: But I know what you mean, Master and Enlightened items give me the most trouble too. If you are open to using scripts, Self-study Quiz can help: start with the “leech training” template and adjust the formula as you see fit (I currently use a ratio of 2).

There was a partial solution back then – Summary Page. I think this can be remade with a script for now. You can see there what you have got wrong, and self-study by yourself. Self Study Quiz is another solution for now, though not sure of exact configuration. I know leech formula is more complicated than that. imo, quizzing on wrong items until you get right, once or twice, is a good idea, rather than waiting for longer than a month. But baking into the default reviewer as a solution is kind of opinionated.

I think we all feel this frustration to some extent. It’s always painful to miss a burn review … again. But WK is unlikely to ever make the change you are requesting, simply because it undermines the premise of the SRS. “Burned” should mean that you can go four months between reviews and still remember the word. Maybe that’s because you’ve learned it so well that you just remember it four months after you last saw it, or maybe that’s because you’ve seen the word in the wild frequently enough that it stays fresh. But if you find yourself needing to artificially introduce extra reviews during that 4-month window, then maybe you don’t really know the word well enough to call it “burned”. Once you burn it, you’ll stop doing the extra reviews, at which point you’re likely to forget it within four months. At least, that’s the basic idea of SRS. How you respond to that premise depends a lot on your personal philosophy and how well you want to learn the words. If you want to truly master every word, then I’d encourage you to address leeches with some approach other than more frequent repetition. Maybe try to come up with a better mnemonic to anchor it more solidly in your memory. Or practice writing the word by hand, which has been thoroughly proven to improve retention. On the other hand, maybe you don’t need to master every word. If you’re reading Japanese regularly, but you’re not ever coming across a certain word, then maybe you just decide you don’t care very much if you can remember that word four months later - you never see it in the real world anyway. In that case, there are plenty of scripts that let you “cheat” - i.e., deviate from the basic SRS timeline by doing extra targeted self-study (e.g., on leeches or by SRS stage), or by just using an undo button to change a wrong answer. No judgment here. Find an approach that gets you where you want to be with the Japanese language, and don’t lose any sleep over it.

Honestly, once I complete level 60, I’m not sure if I’d try to burn everything. At that point I think it’s better to do more immersion like reading books and watching shows or practicing conversational skills with a tutor.

[image] polv: But baking into the default reviewer as a solution is kind of opinionated. This is ultimately why I quit wanikani. The format didn’t work for me after about level 20 or so, and even with scripts I found it wasn’t right. I think creating a one size fits all program like wanikani is itself an act of hubris, although I also admit that it has its merits. In any case, having an unchangeable default setting is itself opinionated, although it works for some.

I totally get this. That’s why I add my WK words to JPDB for some extra practice (though I’m thinking of moving my extra drills to MM since I need the grammar review anyway). The option for studying wrong items doesn’t help much after the time passes but you still don’t see them for a while. That being said, I don’t care too much if I get it wrong and have to do it again. It happens. But I’m also a person that doesn’t mind seeing 200-400 reviews pile up. I’ll get them all to 0 before I level up, little by little.

[image] Squintina: moving my extra drills to MM What is MM? Thank you

[image] Wait: “Burned” should mean that you can go four months between reviews and still remember the word. […] At least, that’s the basic idea of SRS. The problem is… a fixed review schedule will never fit everyone. Sure, you might get to a point where you can go four months (or more!) without seeing an item and still remember it, but for some that might happen only once they’ve seen it 100 times before that 4-month period, not the 11 times (or however many there are) WK showed it up to that point. Hence the need for additional practice in-between. The leech training option of Self-study Quiz is quite cool, because it will show you items until you reach a successful streak in WK’s review schedule, then it’s gone until you fail it again. So eventually you’ll still get to not see it for four months before you can “burn” it. Of course, WK or any other SRS system for that matter, cannot account for your own reading. You might get to see an item a lot of times in content before the final burn review and you ace the review when it comes up. Does that really mean the SRS concept succeeded, if you actually saw it in a book a week or three before the review? I have 2800+ burned right now in WK, but I am certain that some (who knows, maybe even most?) of those are not truly seared into memory :man_shrugging: [image] gwenzzy: What is MM? I’d venture a guess that it’s Marumori.

[image] cezarL: The problem is… a fixed review schedule will never fit everyone. Sure, you might get to a point where you can go four months (or more!) without seeing an item and still remember it, but for some that might happen only once they’ve seen it 100 times before that 4-month period, not the 11 times (or however many there are) WK showed it up to that point. Hence the need for additional practice in-between. The leech training option of Self-study Quiz is quite cool, because it will show you items until you reach a successful streak in WK’s review schedule, then it’s gone until you fail it again. So eventually you’ll still get to not see it for four months before you can “burn” it. Yes, I completely agree. Extra practice to reinforce words is very helpful. I just don’t want to see people fall into the trap of cheating themselves by performing targeted reviews shortly before the words come up for review. That keeps them from realizing the benefit of SRS. And my original point was that SRS is the structure WK is based on, so WK won’t simply do away with the spaced repetition intervals, per this thread’s original suggestion. The fixed timing that WK uses isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for everyone, but it’s a good framework for those who want to use a long-term SRS option, especially with the personal adaptation available through user scripts. Just be sure you understand the system, and be mindful not to use scripts in a way that will undermine it. It’s a little sad to see threads here in which people say they’re quitting WK because the system isn’t working for them, when they’ve also made many comments about all the ways they’ve sidestepped the system with user scripts because they’re in a hurry to burn. One problem that seems to lead to a lot of user frustration is the misconception that we should be burning words as fast as possible, after the initial 9 reviews, and that if we get a burn review wrong, that means we’ve failed, or the system has failed to work for us. That’s silly. Of course you’ll need to see some words more than 9 times. Missing a burn review doesn’t mean something is wrong - it just means you need more exposure to that word. Internalizing a large vocabulary takes a long time. Spreading out your study over many months will probably help you learn it more permanently than cramming a million reviews into a shorter window. There may be stubborn words that you’ll need to recycle repeatedly over the course of a couple of years. That doesn’t mean there’s a problem; that’s how the process is supposed to work. The miracle of SRS is that there are so many words that do get burned after only 9 exposures. This long-term SRS approach may not be the one every Japanese learner wants to use, but it is a perfectly valid approach if you relax and trust the system.

Let's make Wanikani less punishing

WaniKani Feedback

cezarL June 10, 2025, 8:45am 4

This is the script for the summary page.
But just for this particular purpose, it’s not really needed as WK now has its own “Recent mistakes” section so one could note down the failed items from there to practice them separately.

Yes yes, they explain how the formula works in the script’s settings screen

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Let's make Wanikani less punishing

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