Hi all,
I finished level 60 a while ago, and want to refresh everything / start over. I’ve not properly used WaniKani in a couple of years, but I’ve kinda-sorta kept in touch with some Japanese reading in the meantime, so there’s a subset of characters and words that I’m still comfortable with.
I’ve had a bit of a look around, and my options seem to include:
resetting everything back to Level 1
using the Extra Study feature on the home page
using the Self-Study Quiz script
Option 1 seems to be the most systematic way to go about things, but I dread the time required (and ensuring boredom) to go through re-“learning” all the radicals, and all of the characters and words that I still know well. Before I take that drastic route, is there a way to say “please immediately burn this radical/character/word”, so that I can focus on just the ones that I really need to re-learn/refresh?
Or, are there other options apart from the three I listed above? I had a quick look at options 2 and 3, but for the characters and words that I’ve truly forgotten, I think I’d like to go through the normal WaniKani SRS process - but I’m open to suggestions!
There’s the ability to manually resurrect burned items, though I don’t know if there’s a script to help you do it in batches because otherwise you’re going to have to do every single one individually from their individual item page. It would be a chore, but I don’t know if it would be more or less of a chore than relearning all the items you already know if you reset. WK has no manual burn option, and afaik there isn’t a script to let you do that either, but I could be wrong
The only other thing I can think of is KameSame, which lets you add items from WK (as well as JLPT lists and a top 10,000 words list) to its SRS and lets you mark items as known. But while it’s based on it, it’s not exactly the same as WK, as it tests on reading + EN>JP rather than reading + JP>EN
Hopefully others will have more info, and I hope you’ll be able to find something that works for you!
You can reset to a level of your choice, no? Doesn’t have to be 1.
But really, burn reviews is the best way to go. You can review at will and are not held back by levels. You can review all content every few months instead of taking a year+ to get to review everything.
To extend on this a little bit, if you manually unburn an item, you can manually burn it again, but you can’t burn it on demand if you reset. And I fully agree that unburning everything manually would be extremely tedious, and resetting to level 1 would also be very tedious.
Therefore my route of choice would probably be doing a quiz on the burned items and either unburning them or adding them to another SRS if you want to relearn them, plus immersion for natural exposure to words and kanji that are useful to you. You can also SRS those words if you want. Or you could skip the first half and just do the immersion part, if you find out that you still remember enough. Good luck!
I went with option 1, it works ok, the boredom is quickly over. But if I had to redo it, I would limit myself to level 6, I found that for me it was the level where it begin to be interesting.
Another way is resurrecting by Kanji level, but all vocabularies associated with the Kanji, rather than being restricted by the level.
At some point, vocabularies for a Kanji might not be enough to define that Kanji anymore, so a Yomichan deck would be convenient and personalized for that.
Well, I have already reset to Level 2, so I have no more of that choice; but indeed I have paired Yomichan. Only that I might recommend not to rush with Yomichan / Anki. What to do first matters.
Thanks for the replies and suggestions everyone. Manually burning or unburning so many kanji and words doesn’t seem feasible, so I guess I just need to pick a level and take the plunge.
As an aside, it’s a shame that WaniKani appears to have made little progress in the 2+ years that I’ve been away; maybe I’ll spot the improvements when I get stuck back into it.
For example, in late 2018 I replied to a [holiday of choice] message from WaniKani, wondering why they didn’t incorporate something like the White Rabbit graded readers to match (say) every five WK levels. It would be a huge help for many learners, and presumably an additional source of revenue for them. Win-win!! The reply was that they have “something in the works that’s along the same lines, but I think quite a bit better. Also will take quite a bit longer”. I wonder what became of that. About once per year I reply to ask about progress, but as of a bit over a year ago there was nothing to share.
There seems to be so many opportunities to expand the great “learn kanji (and a bunch of vocab)!” base they have, whether it be incorporating the best scripts, graded reading, graded listening, reading + EN>JP, more/better/optional vocab card sets, learning grammar, etc. I wonder if they need more funding, or more staff, or more imagination, or what it might be.
I would firstly find content that I enjoy and find a way to cram it into my daily routines and life overall. Then I would worry about kanji.
Otherwise you’ll just bounce back and forth and rely on motivation from time to time, then a vacation comes up, woops a couple of weeks gone, “ill start on monday”.
If I had to go through kanji again I would just reset to 1 and go full speed. Messing up something little along the way can have problems with leeches later on, especially since meanings and definitions have changed fairly frequently.
As someone who is nearing level 60, I can not currently understand why somebody would choose to go through that whole slog once again.
Yes, you probably forgot a bunch of stuff in the meantime but so what? Even if you go through everything again, it’s bound to happen that you forget things.
WK gives you a foundation from which you can then focus on other ways of engaging with Japanese. Like engaging with actual content and so picking up things organically, making Anki decks specifically for things that are troubling you (e.g. similar Kanji), focusing on vocabulary in a particular area etc.
If finishing WK meant you stopped learning / using japanese, then i really dont see a point in doing this same thing again, youll feel good about doing something productive again, but youll be just postponing getting out of this nest. Its a bit weird that all three options you are considering take WK for granted, in my opinion doing anki or other SRS and just adding stuff youve forgotten would get you better results unless the last time youve seen kanji is like 10 years ago.
Have you learned any grammar along the way? What are the things you are saying youve “kinda-sorta kept in touch” with? I would much rather focus on other stuff like learning more grammar and especially getting into more reading than restarting WK, there will be bunch of stuff you still remember and even the now forgotten things probably dont need as many repetitions to get back to good level, so you would be losing lot of time (and motivation to even learn)
The concerns expressed above are based on false assumptions. My question is purely about how I can use WK to go back over the kanji; it’s not about vocab or grammar or speaking or listening, which I handle separately.
WK’s poor design is going to make that difficult and probably not sensible, but it was worth checking.
Since you on the one hand seem to think that WK is poorly designed but on the other hand insist that you want to go through it all again, I’m not sure what you want.
You asked for opinions, my opinion is that you shouldn’t reset to level 1. Doing all of WK entails doing an ungodly amount of reviews and if you know many of the items already, that’s just going to serve no purpose and take up a lot of your time. If you really want to stick with WK, quiz yourself on burned items and manually unburn ones you don’t remember well. Someone upthread linked the burn manager script that should be helpful in that respect.
On Kitsun, I posted a kanji mean/reading deck here which also includes hyperlinks to WK if you need to reference for mnemonics and whatnot. It is ordered by N-level instead and you can of course hibernate and filter to your liking (also includes the remain Joyo kanji). I also have the writing version of that deck here. And if you want the mnemonic version w/ vocab of the remaining Joyo with a WK-like experience, you can find that here as well.
I actually have the same dilemma at the moment. I began studying Japanese maybe 8-9 years ago, and went through Wanikani in maybe 3 years? Can remember exactly.
Now I’m pretty good at speaking, understanding speech and reading. But the lesser frequent kanji are slipping away - so I was wondering if I should do Wanikani over again.
I’ve had great decks in Anki, but I just can’t stand using that program anymore. I want to use something that’s completely done and ready to use without me having to add extra data. I’m willing to pay for that, but already got lifetime Wanikani.
I wouldn’t do any of this, or rely on WK for Kanji learning at all anymore.
Chances are you retained more than you think rn. In your case, I would simply do immersion and look up what you don’t remember. Maybe make Anki cards in that case.
Restarting WK means putting in another hundreds of hours that you could use more efficiently otherwise. Opt for materials with Furigana so you have the readings.