Level 21 before 2021!

WaniKani
#1082

I know the feeling. I have no advice to offer except to keep on keeping on. It’s a grind, but if it was easy, everyone’d be speaking Japanese.

If it’s any consolation, the kanji that I found impossible to remember from levels 9/10 seem easy to me now. There will always be ‘difficult kanji’ (some level 13 mnemonics are fairly convoluted and … impossible to remember :wink:) but if you continue on, these kanji get replaced with other ones. That might seem like a depressing thought, but it’s actually quite motivating. They won’t stay difficult forever. Trust the grind, it works :slight_smile:

5 Likes
#1083

Woho! Congrats on your level-up! WK and this community makes all the difference for me too.

1 Like
#1084

I was wondering how you can see each others stats?
And welcome to lvl 13 Marifly! Good job.
I’ll level up today (hopefully) but I’ve reduced my apprentice items to 89, which I am very proud of! (sorry I had to share)
So even as I really struggled around lvl 11 and 12, 13 made everything better. So let’s keep at it everyone!

3 Likes
#1085

Keep going! The review session will slowly get better. And don’t get to upset about the score, I honestly think 78% is pretty good! I’m usually everywhere between 43% and 86% depending on how focused I can be at the time and the size of the review. Do smaller portions spaced out if you can, that helps a lot with keeping focus!
Sometimes you will have rough weeks and do stupid mistakes, but then you will definitely know those words later! Just as @Marifly says, an opppotunity to learn something better!

2 Likes
#1086

My life story lol. I never had more than a passing interest in Japan. But my friends were japanophiles. They couldn’t get enough. I ended up joining the usaf and got stationed in Okinawa. One thing led to another and now I live here permanently lol. I watch more anime now because of my kids and my husband. But basically I still like Western TV shows. I often watch them dubbed in Japanese to study than watch original media omg!

4 Likes
#1087

Woop just hit level 5! Made it in 8 days this time, which is way faster than I thought I could manage. I’ve got a good schedule going (based on @jprspereira’s Ultimate Guide, what else?) and I’m going to see if I can keep it up for now, but if it slips to 10+ day levels at some point that’s fine too.

I’m also thinking of starting to use KameSame for E->J before I get a huge stack of WK vocab to review. Interested to hear if others here have found that or KaniWani useful?

3 Likes
#1088

Thank you!

If you go to https://www.wanikani.com/users/username you can see other isers’ stats. So my stats are at https://www.wanikani.com/users/marifly and yours are at https://www.wanikani.com/users/yuuzuu

1 Like
#1089

I ended up in the same situation a few times. If you are feeling overwhelmed and cannot bear to look at wanikani put it in vacation mode. That way your reviews don’t pile up further discouraging you.

When you have the energy take off holiday and start working through the backlog. You can put back on holiday mode after working through some/all of your backload.

When you are ready to start leveling again be wary of burnout and don’t be afraid to stop or reduce lessons. Also don’t be afraid to put on holiday mode.

I just came out of a 3 week funk of letting reviews get overdue. My highest amount was about 300. I got through it without resetting.

4 Likes
#1090

I think that is fair. I’m not huge into Anime or even television, (which I’m counting in Netflix) but being in IT, I definitely see a large overlap. Same with gamers, there appears to be a large overlap between the groups. Just because I happen to be studying Japanese and in IT, but don’t like anime doesn’t mean I need to fight the stereotype. I have many friends who fit the bill perfectly. lol
I am not a ‘coder’,(aka, developer) but I definitely do make quite a bit of scripts and small programs while performing my duties in IT.

And I finally had to slow down. I’m level 9 and getting overwhelmed. I’ll wait until my pile is cut down a little before learning any new radicals/kanji. Given a couple of days, I should be back to chugging along. Oh, now that I actually live in Japan, reinforcement is actually really helping. Road signs like 八王子 pop out to me and a light goes off in my head. It’s pretty cool.

3 Likes
#1091

Thank you for giving your take on the whole conversation! I thought this discussion to be long dead ^^. Regarding the gamers: I think that’s basically just like Anime/Manga, since the japanese gaming industry is huge. So when you really like some games you get interested in their origin (and want to understand them in their original language).
I’m level 9 currently, too, and although I don’t have a big lesson pile I’m starting to feel an increase in kanji meaning complexity for the first time. The other day I forgot 3 out five kanji, that were about to be guru’d, completely. And that never happened to me before. So yeah, basically I’m struggling with level 9 as well.

1 Like
#1092

I’m not going to pretend I know the root cause, but I definitely believe there is a large overlap on that diagramn. Personally, I think it is more of a cultural thing. People who play video games tend to like anime, which means that new people who start playing video games kind of get dragged into that. A kind of self-feeding loop. Same with Starwars/LoTR.

But yeah, you are doing better than I am. I’m at 67 lessons, including level 9’s kanji/radicals. I don’t ever want to fall behind on reviews, because that is when information starts slipping away from me. I’ve retained a near 90% accuracy from the beginning. I would rather let the new lessons pile up and go ahead and clear them at my own pace. When I finally start hitting the radicals/kanji for level 9, I’ll have already Guru’d those vocab from the previous level.

1 Like
#1093

I’ve been using KameSame! I can’t even remember why I really started (I’ve been using it since I started WaniKani). I think it was just because it was recommended by @jprspereira in the same guide you mentioned. And now, like everything else, it’s become a habit that’s harder to break than continue.

This might be a bit of a cheat, but I’ve found it useful for maintaining a high accuracy in my WaniKani reviews. Also, I don’t actually write in Japanese all that much so I can’t say whether it’s helped there but I have noticed I can recall a lot of vocab I learned through WaniKani when I’m speaking in Japanese. Again, I started KameSame and WaniKani at the same time so I can’t say definitively whether I’d be as good as I am now at recall if I didn’t use KameSame. But I’m pretty sure it doesn’t hurt my Japanese!

4 Likes
#1094

Interesting - it does worry me a bit that it might mess with the SRS, but it sounds like you haven’t found that to be too much of a problem. I’ll give it a go and see how I find it!

2 Likes
#1095

Ping! Dreaded Level 14!

I thought something was up when I saw only 6 shiny new blue box Radicals to learn for Level 14… surely it couldn’t be that easy all of a sudden! Lol. This will be fun…

5 Likes
#1096

sounds like a great idea, im in

6 Likes
#1097

Good luck! I think most levels from level 14 on have few radicals.

#1098

Welcome! Just jump right in!

#1099

Yes my thoughts exactly!
all those new lessons!! But we’ll manage :raised_hands:
I might stick around a bit longer on this level

1 Like
#1100

I’ve looked up the numbers and do not see any major difference between level 14 and below.
Is the the difficult of the kanji on that level that is dreaded? :relaxed:

#1101

For me personally it is the fact I had my apprentice items down to 39, 0/0 in level 13, levelled up and in came about 120 new lessons (even the crabigator panicked!).

And it just looked so good with only 6 radicals and 23 kanji to start of with. I have done 50 lessons now and still feels okay. Most of the vocab make sense and are easy to remember. So I was mostly dreading the sheer volume of new lessons.

4 Likes