Thanks for this post. It sounds very very familiar. I guess it’s just not easy to learn Japanese. I was expecting to whip through wanikani in a bit over a year (because that was as fast as it could be done) but it soon became apparent it was at least two years. Now I’m looking like more than 5 years, by which time I will have forgotten most of it. So it seems like a race to learn enough to get to reading before you forget it all. I’ve paused on about 23 to do grammar on Bunpo. Transitive/intransitive pairs are killing me! But overall I think I’m just more relaxed now about enjoying the process. Some wanikani, some grammar, some reading and generally I think I’m making progress. Just maybe it’s a 10 year+ journey rather than the wildly optimistic 2 year journey. Maybe you just inspired me to go back to wanikani for a few more months and maybe pause again at 30 or 35. Cheers and good luck with your journey.
I’ve been in this for literal years at this point. I think I know the solution, but no one’s gonna like it. It’s so bad because those are leeches. You could study only those, but by the time you even realize you have them, you actually have a lot of them. And you also probably have a lot of regular active items. So I think items that have past an X number of reviews with lower than Y% success rate should be removed from the SRS pool. Either to be reintroduced later or even never. Look, you’re either not going to learn them by SRS or it’s going to take a really long time. It’s much more efficient to work on what’s at least somewhat sticking.
Alternatively iirc there are sites that can match manga and books to Wanikani vocabulary, so you can find those and read the books/ manga/ VNs that match WK vocab the most.
Alternatively, what I’m doing - stop lessons for a literal year and grind at the leeches.