I’ve noticed an interesting thing happening with maybe a dozen or so items. Basically, I first answer the item wrong, then right. That is the SRS pattern I have learned–the wrong answer comes first, it has been learned through SRS! Most of these are rendaku issues.
Any suggestions on how to deal? I’ve actually looked at these items specifically later, but they seem to be very resistant, unlike other leeches. I am afraid that the SRS will actually cement the wrong answer in my head.
Not being able to suspend items is a weakness of WaniKani. Madness is doing the same mistake over and over again and expecting a different result.
Personally if something really won’t stick I use undo to pass it anyway and get it out of the way. You’ll be able to reconsider later if you want to give it another try.
Sometimes all it takes is encountering a leech in the wild in a meaningful context to have it finally stick!
The way I deal with “perma leeches” —items that remain leeches for an inordinate amount of time and which I just can’t seem to get down no matter how I try—is… I don’t. I make a decision about whether an item has remained a leech for too long, and I just pass it by adding a synonym and/or simply using double-check. My problem with these words is always that I don’t come across them while reading, and for these particular ones, learning them in a vacuum just isn’t enough.
If I don’t need to know the word now, I don’t necessarily need to learn it now, especially if it’s just gonna cause me a lot of stress, frustration, and demotivation. I can learn it later on when I actually have need of it, and I can always unburn it on WK if I want the extra practice.
Once you start immersing, if you haven’t already, you’ll start having things click as your brain makes more connections. While it can still work, our brains aren’t really made to learn things in a vacuum, so if efforts to do so (reviewing and/or making up new mnemonics, simply trusting it to SRS, etc.) aren’t going so well, don’t beat yourself up over it. It’s okay to put them off until later. You’ll get them eventually.
That’s a totally legit strategy, and I think it was actually recommended by the guy who made the original SuperMemo. Just delete that one. A small handful out of a couple of thousand items is not going to make a noticeable difference.
One slightly less-extreme thing you can do now is drill your recent mistakes from the front page. When I get a super-stubborn one, I just do that every couple of hours. It eventually changes the wrong → right loop into wr…-wait a second, dont answer that so fast → right
You’re almost there. You don’t need to know the right answer immediately, you just need to recognize DANGER DANGER when you see it and skip to your second (correct) answer after thinking a second.
My problem tends to be that I don’t have a first and second answer, but there’s still two options and it’s basically a coin flip as to whether I choose the right one or not.
Slightly late to the party, but, in cases where you get the wrong answer a lot, I find that the wrong answer comes after a couple of seconds thought but once properly learned recall is instant.
So for leeches like this unless the answer (or at least the mnemonic) is instant I use the don’t know button rather than writing what I half think it might be and reinforcing a likely wrong answer.
Obviously you need a “don’t know” button for this…
does wk not have a dont know button … yet???
i swear they used too… what??
maybe I’m thinking of bunpro lmao