So I started Wanikani on August 7th and I’m now up to level 2, not sure when I hit that. Up until the beginning this week I was getting high scores and wasn’t messing up too often at all. On August 13th though I scored 53% on my review and was devastated, so I began my search on how to improve! I scoured the WaniKani community posts and came to a conclusion.
Every time I mess up on something, even if it’s an accident, I will write down the kanji/vocab/radical. Then I will write out the hiragana version. After that, I go through and read the mnemonic once more and if need be I create my own. My first session today (August 15th), which was about 71 in total for reviews ended at 73%. Not amazing but it was better! I just finished my second session, which was 71 in total for reviews, and got 87%! I was so excited and I could definitely see how much this was helping me.
I know that I’m still very much a noob and new to this community but I thought this would be great for others like me that might be struggling. Don’t give up and keep on pushing!
One thing I wish I had done earlier is turn on the feature where WK pronounces the vocab after you get the reading correct during reviews. It really helps to re-enforce the readings.
True, don’t be afraid to change your approach! But while you are writing everything down, make sure to pay attention to stroke order, it will help you write from memory later on (if that is one of your goals). Also, if certain meanings give you trouble, look them up in other dictionaries, or add synonyms in your native language, if it’s not English.
Honestly not a big fan of the percentages.
SRS is designed to be a patient teacher, not a test. Review items come back faster if you get them wrong, so you learn from your mistakes, that’s like the whole point.
Also the percentages will be wildly different for batches with lots of fresh apprentice items, or batches with lots of enlightened items or leeches.
Don’t fret the percentages, you’ll burn those review items someday
Thank you for saying this! This is the comment I always want to see on these posts and hardly ever do. I don’t intentionally study the WaniKani vocabulary outside of WaniKani (obviously I come across things when reading other materials or doing other types of study), and it’s genuinely been so helpful to me to just keep getting things wrong.
People tend to remember that with an SRS after each review the card comes at a later interval, but forget that it’s actually that after each successful review the card comes at a later interval. If you get something wrong in your review, you don’t know it well enough to move on yet, and that’s fine. It’s actually good. It means the SRS is working.
Oh for sure! Once I’ve studied Japanese for a while I feel that my study methods will change a decent amount. It’s similar to when you first learn your native language ^.^ and I use tanoshiji for stroke order
When I had a similar problem I made a thread on how I solved it. Perhaps you will find some useful ideas there.
Failing is part of learning as other posters have said. It is useful to have a process to handle your leeches. This is the name we give to items that cause trouble in reviews. There are scripts that are designed to do some extra study of leeches. One of them is the script that I wrote: Item Inspector.
Another script you may consider is Leech Training. it is a different style of studying because it uses a quiz instead of a table. You may try both scripts and see what is best for you.
