Needing advice! Drowning in reviews after level 60

[Waninoko158]

Hey pals, wondering if anyone has any tips for someone who is in too deep.

In the lead up the Animal Crossing I was crushing levels like never before, and made it to 60 so I could read/enjoy as much of the game in Japanese as possible. The problem came after when I couldn’t keep up the pace of doing 100-300 reviews a day (pic below of my loooong level 59/60). Over the last few months they keep getting higher and higher and I’ve not had the same ability to keep up the pace and now I am sitting at 2,000+ reviews, and obviously since I was going pretty quick I sadly forget a few and they come back pretty quickly.
Wonder if there is a way to limit what reviews come back, or at what speed, or if you have your own study advice for this position!

Thanks a lot

[seanblue]

@Waninoko158

Wonder if there is a way to limit what reviews come back, or at what speed, or if you have your own study advice for this position!

Sure… Doing fewer lessons and getting more reviews right. Obviously you’re not doing any more lessons, so that leaves reviews. If you get fewer than (roughly) 2/3 of reviews right on average, you’re actually going to have more reviews, not less. So the answer is to “do better”, as unhelpful as that is. (And you can’t rely on WK Stats to see if your correct rate is over 2/3 since the site grades you differently than WaniKani.)

What you’re probably dealing with most is “leeches”. Items that you just can’t seem to get right and never go away. You could use Self Study along with Additional Filters to try to review your leeches outside of the SRS cycle to try to pin them down. This personally never worked for me (I didn’t have the patience), but I think it has worked well for others. Alternatively, you could just drop WaniKani at this point and move on to other things.

[Arzar33]

The script that helped me the most post-level 60 to tackle leech was confusionguesser:

[Userscript] ConfusionGuesser

ConfusionGuesser General script installation instructions Open Framework installation ConfusionGuesser Recommended: activate “Use IDS” in the settings menu (see screenshots below) What does it do? If you give a wrong answer during a review, this script guesses which other WK items you confused the question with and displays them in a list, so that you can review the differences immediately. More precisely, if you answered with a wrong meaning, it displays items with your entered meaning, and…

Right after turning on this script I was amazed to discovered the sheer number of visually similar kanji that I never noticed before, probably because they are far apart in WK level. I would sometimes bring them all the way to enlightened and fail because I would confuse them with the other one.

But not just kanji, sometimes I would confuse the reading of a word with another word, but instead of having a fail and not knowing why, confusion guesser immediately point out the wrong word, and just knowing that information would let me understand why I confused them in the first place.

So anyway, confusion guesser is amazing at finding confusion that we didn’t even know existed in the first place, and by level 60 a lot of them have accumulated.

[Marifly]

Use the reorder script and do only reviews for the lowest 10 levels for a while. When you have OK control over the first 10 levels, move on to the next 10 levels. Rinse and repeat until you have gone though all levels and gotten everything spread out more.

[Saida]

Use a kind of reorder to do burn reviews first. Even if you get them wrong, they won’t come back for two weeks, keeping immediate reviews from piling on.

[prouleau]

@seanblue

You could use Self Study along with Additional Filters to try to review your leeches outside of the SRS cycle to try to pin them down.

There are other scripts that can help you with leeches. You may try them and find out which works best for you.

One is Leech training. This setup quizzes specifically targeted to leeches. It keeps track of which leeches have been learned so they don’t come up again in subsequent quizzes.

[Userscript] Leech training

This used to be another script, written by hitechbunny, but it stopped being maintained. I will now crib the other script’s description: The script is here: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/372086-shin-wanikani-leech-trainer The script will put together a lesson of 10 leeches. It will exclude any leech that is too recent (less than 24 hours since the last review), or too old (less than half the time between reviews remaining), or already trained. Any trained leech that is subsequently reviewe…

You may also consider Item Inspector. (Disclosure: I am the author of Item Inspector) This script displays the leeches in a table on the dashboard. You go over them one by one. reciting meaning and reading. Then you hover the mouse over the item and the answer is displayed. If you click on an item the item page is displayed.

[Userscript] Wanikani Item Inspector

Requirements: [ General Script Installation instructions ] You’ll need a script host plugin like TamperMonkey [ Open Framework Installation ] [ Open Framework Additional Filters Installation ] [Self Study Quiz Installation ] [ Kanji Stroke Order Font ] Download the script here: Description Wanikani Item Inspector displays information about Wanikani radicals, kanjis and vocabulary items in tabular form. Data about items are queried with filters to create the table. You ma…

[Ryouki]

@seanblue

you could just drop WaniKani at this point and move on to other things.

I feel like this is the best option. If you’re already reading, then just keep reading. That’s the whole point of WK in the first place.

[Stay_coolXD]

What i did when igot stuck at level 9(for a month) is whenever i finish a review section. I revisit the items lesson page depending on whether i get the reading/meaning i review the mnemonics.
I still do that now(for my obvious leeches) but for normal items i just review what is the meaning and reading after each failed attempt.
P.s: i basically click on every failed item after review section(not lesson page but to show reading/meaning)

[girakacheezer]

@Marifly

Use the reorder script and do only reviews for the lowest 10 levels for a while. When you have OK control over the first 10 levels, move on to the next 10 levels. Rinse and repeat until you have gone though all levels and gotten everything spread out more.

I’d second Marifly’s advice on using a reorder script, since this will keep you doing reviews for the same items until you start getting them right. Just using the reorder script to prioritize lower level items first should help a bunch.

[jprspereira]

I honestly think that using the reorder script is a bad suggestion. Ordering by SRS level is okayish, but ordering by level will hurt your learning. If you have 2 kanji that you’re mixing up but you know one is from level 10 and the other is from level 50… and you just reviewed a low level word… you’ll know the answer without knowing how to distinguish them at all.

My recommendations would be:

• Add your leeches to another SRS of your choice. This way, you can start moving on to another SRS platform (because I’m assuming you won’t limit yourself to WK vocab). I also think that SRSing these words from the ground up is giving your brain a 2nd “first exposure” to the words/kanji. It worked wonders for me.

• A lot of people completely drop WK after level 60, which leads to them completely killing their momentum to learn Japanese. Our brain works based on routines. If WK was a big part of your Japanese routine, stopping WK wil take a hit in your studies. It’s okay for you to have a couple hundreds of reviews in the pile, but my advice is to keep at it. Don’t wanna do hundreds of reviews a day? Do 100 or less, whatever you feel comfortable with. Eventually the number of daily reviews will go down either way.

Also, dropping WK after reaching level 60 can imply that you’ll never get to be tested on burning reviews for items from 20 or more levels ago. I know it depends on one’s speed but you get the idea

[Jonapan]

I mean, you’re level 60, and there’s no new content coming into your lesson pile, so really this is the time to work at your own pace. I feel no pressure to clear all my reviews anymore, because it’s all just recall at this point. Do as much as you feel comfortable doing each day, and shift your focus to reading native material so you recognize more things from real contexts.

[jhubert]

Hi,
I think you can use the wanikani app and when you do a mistake, have a second try. That is a way to have a more successful percentage of good answers for Wanikani and it will allow to burn some almost known topic more easily. At least, I think it works for me

[Waninoko158]

I did this and today finally made it back to 0 reviews appreciate it!!!