I’ve been doing Wanikani religiously for the past 6 months and it felt great. I was studying on the side and I could see a lot of progress. However, at the end of September (the 19th), I decided to go on a tropical island for my birthday and I really thought I’d study there but I’m ashamed to say I stopped EVERYTHING on its track. I got distracted and lazy and could not think a second about languages while I was there.
Now, I’m back and I’m a little panicked. I did my reviews. I have over 1000 of them waiting and when I actually did them, I got very basic kanji wrong. I wonder if I should just go through the pile and get used to it again or if I should straight-up reset a few levels.
I know some of you might have been in this situation and I trust your experience to know which way is best.
I’ve been in this situation before a couple times! Yes, I recommend resetting a few levels. Resetting let me focus on reviews for the kanji/vocab I once really knew instead of constantly cycling through piles of apprentice reviews. It also let me relearn the reset kanji/vocab and solidify them in my mind.
This is how I would do it: Look through the levels and see where you don’t know the majority of the kanji and vocab. This will probably be 2 or 3 levels back. So at level 15, see how you feel about level 12/13 content. Even just resetting your current level items (resetting all level 15) may be helpful! I don’t recommend resetting to level 1, and I don’t recommend resetting super far back all at once. If you reset a little and realize you still are struggling, you can reset a few more levels back.
When you reset, you’ll likely still have a ton of reviews. Don’t do them all at once, just chip away at them ~50 or ~100 at a time until they’re done. And when you start redoing the lessons you reset, don’t rush through them. Just work through them like you did when you first learned them.
And finally, don’t worry too much about getting basic kanji wrong, when you have a ton of reviews it’s easy to mix everything up and get tired quickly. Once your reviews go down, it’ll be easier to remember those basic kanji since you aren’t overwhelmed with reviews. At least that’s how it’s been in my experience
I wouldn’t recommend resetting, but instead I’d recommend sorting the reviews by Wanikani level and doing around 50-100 reviews a day. It’s basically the same as resetting but it would take far less time to catch up than resetting.
Also, don’t forget to use vacation mode next time!
You can enable it in settings and it will pause reviews. That way they won’t pile up.
I paused Wanikani for 3 years! I got back into it about a month ago and didn’t need to reset any levels because nothing had piled up. I’m taking reviews and lessons as they come letting the ones I’ve forgotten drop to lower stages as I get them wrong.
