So I’ve taken a couple months off… well, pretty much everything including Japanese for some much needed mental health assistance. Now I’m looking at tentatively doing some study again and wondering if, facing down nearly 2000 reviews, I’d be better off starting again. I’m actually pretty confident in my memory, but I have a lot of burns that I’d like to refresh and I’m also confident that I could get to the mid 20’s at close to optimal pace if I started again, and it would ease me back into where I was as well.
I’m leaning towards reset but I’m wondering about the opinions of those that have done it before, whether you think it was worth it or should I just leave my burns burned and take the accuracy hit to smash through my reviews. Give me your opinion.
You could go through the lists of items and then only reset to a level where you see that you are not familiar anymore with most of them; doing the first 10 or 15 levels again might not be necessary but you’ll see what feels right for you.
In addition, you could use the burn manager script to go through the remaining levels that you didn’t reset and resurrect only the items that you are not confident in anymore.
On the other hand, as you said, a fresh start and slowly easing back into things might be nice too. If you just had a couple of difficult months, maybe the last thing you need is figuring out which level to reset too, unburning items, not being sure which ones to reset and which ones are fine, struggling with reviews of previous level items that you don’t know as well as you thought you would and so on… It sounded to me like that is the direction that you are leaning towards anyway. You would then have a more solid foundation of the first 30 levels which would be nice too.
I was in a very similar situation recently, having taken a few months off due to WaniKani burnout, and when I restarted, I not know the contents of the recent levels any more.
I was level 25 at the time, and my strategy was to use the Ultimate Reorder script to work my way up in my reviews. So I set myself an initial level limit (don’t remember exactly, maybe level 10, but please pick whatever makes sense to you), and I did all the reviews up until that level. I stayed at this level for a few days and only cleared the reviews of those levels, ignoring the higher level reviews. Then I slowly worked my way upwards until level 20.
When I tried to jump to level 21, I felt that I did not know the kanji any more and that the vocabulary would be overwhelming, so after a day of hesitation or so, I reset to level 21. In hindsight this was the best thing I could do at that point. I am now working my way up again, and it just feels good.
I think in your case, you might also be able to find out your “sweet spot” level for resetting by checking the kanji and vocab reviews level-by-level?
I second @NicoleIsEnough and @irrelephant opinion. I have reset to level 1 (was level 12) because I had stopped wanikani for over a year, but in hindsight it might not have been the brightest idea. Doing the earlier levels was too easy, and I probably could have reset to lvl 10 and be totally fine. I don’t think it’s time wasted, because it got my motivation up again, but resetting to too early of a level might make you feel a bit frustrated, because you know everything and WK feels too easy, but that’s only false confidence, because when you get back to your before-reset level, it gets actually quite hard.
You can easily reset your last 5 levels or so to clear out a huge chunk of your backlog instantly, and leave mostly things that you would be more familiar with.
Try this first before you do a full reset. It helped me a few times when I was trying to get back into it. (From level 30 or so as well). Eventually I fell out of the habit for a full 2 years and ended up doing the full reset, but I think its a last option.
Probably good ideas, 1-30 would take at least 6 months and probably 5-10 levels wouldn’t be too uncomfortable. Scanning over the vocab lists I feel like I still remember more than I suspected, so maybe I’ll take it down a few levels and do a bit of reading material on the side to catch me up on the stuff that’s a little fuzzy; I might allocate a day to scan through the vocab lists and see where it starts to get very sketchy. Thanks.
I was in a similar situation two months ago, when I came back from a one year break from WK and everything Japanese. No two learners are the same, I think, and as for me, I decided to just take on the review pile head on. I didn’t use the reorder script to go through the kanji by level, but I used it to get reading-meaning of one kanji / one vocab right after another. This way it didn’t feel as random.
At first I was getting an accuracy of maybe 30-40 percent, but also a lot of burns, and now, nearly two months in, I have my new lessons down to 41 (I actually did my level 19 radicals today!) and am at an accuracy of 90+ again with normal review count. If you decide not to reset, it is crucial to not do any new lessons until you have your review pile under control and your apprentice count down to at least 150.
It really worked for me (though it was a bit frustrating, especially after getting the review pile down to zero only to have it jump up to 500 again pretty soon), and I don’t know, maybe it would have been easier, if I had reset maybe 3-5 levels. But I’m happy with the turn-out, so.
As long as you start again, I’m sure you’ll be fine, no matter which way you decide to go! Although I agree, resetting to level 1 would probably be a bit too drastic and not necessary.
If you want some more opinions, I also did a thread where some people shared their journey through similar hardships.
I was at level 50 when hit the reset button. For me, it was refreshing. Today, my main study source is japanese podcasts so i dont feel that i lost something when did the reset. IMHO, just go for it, reset and be happy.
ps.: dont go too fast… theres no need to rush, just keep consuming japanese content and eventually everything will stick in ur mind =)
I was wondering where you ran off to. Your accuracy is more than impressive so I’m sure you’ll do well once you get back into the swing of things. I absolutely have no advice to give but just want to say hi, welcome back and good luck.
Thanks for the kind words, everyone. I have missed the community here.
Honestly the more I stare at these burned items that I just straight up can’t remember, the more I’m leaning towards full reset. It’ll mean I can treat wanikani a bit more casually for a while while I get my bearings and catch up on the grammar material I was working on. I’m sure it’ll come back easily but I don’t think it will hurt to steadily reintroduce the material rather than brick wall myself again immediately by trying to pick up where I left off. I’m not in a hurry and I don’t want to burn out again the second I kick off, it was just weighing whether it would be more demoralizing to start again at level 1 or to start again at say 25 feeling like I cant remember half of what I burned.
