Today’s Saturday, I reset my status last Friday, that means a week is over; how have I done? So far, so good, I’d say.
As stated, I planed to first just stay on WaniKani and get some kind of routine back with it. I started WaniKani every morning after waking up, did all my reviews and put on a timer for the upcoming reviews of the day. I also did basically all the lessons as soon as they became available, and it was pretty straight forward and easy to do (keeping in mind, that I’ve already been there). So today morning at 1am, before I went to bed, I managed to get to Level 3. All the while managing to keeping a nearly 100% accuracy.
That changed mainly due to today morning; I first did my lessons (40 of them), and already there I realized that I wasn’t too concentrated - but doing lessons and the quiz doesn’t do you much bad… then however, when doing my reviews afterwards I made a lot of stupid mistakes (like switching around ~日 and ~月 readings and/or meanings). And maybe this is also the time to start slowing things down again. I mean, I reset my Level 5 for a reason (i.e., not recalling any of the Level 5/Level 4 items, and not being sure if that would also be true for Levels 3-1); as soon as I recognize the pace is not working out anymore because I don’t remember things, I need to slow down to a more natural pensum; this is my plan:
Doing all my reviews as soon as they pop up, whenever possible (i.e. during the day I’ll set the timer for days I am at home [being able to work from home since 2020, this is a luxury I have]), and learning 10 new items a day, right in the morning.
I also found out that the heat map partially stopped working and found the reason here on the forums. That’s a shame, even though I get it. I know there is this local storage solution, but I guess my paranoid settings deleted all the progress (whenever I close my browser all info saved gets deleted - and yes, the stats show that for the last 2 days I didn’t shut down my PC - had some heavy calculations running during the night 
).
And I somehow stumbled upon this thread, and got caught up with point 3: “The Wanikani’s sibling that you need to meet” - actually haven’t read through the rest of it. The point made, that got me thinking is this:
There is a lot of truth in this, and I was eager to try it out, so I did and tried out KaniWani with the first lesson (it’s pretty nice that you can actually lock the lessons manually); and even the first lesson where I have 100% accuracy in WaniKani and manage to go through really fast, was rather slow and difficult. In the end, I just made two mistakes, but for each item I had to think about the solution probably in 3-4 times longer than on WaniKani plus the mistakes showed me, something even more interesting:
First I typed in 工 for artificial; then I remembered that this is actually construction and artificial is man-made; so I typed in 工人, which is obviously wrong as well - and then I started guessing: 口人？Only then did I realize that the order was wrong; 人工, of course. When I see it, I automatically hear the voice of the audio on WaniKani pronouncing it in my head; so the recognition works really well. But recalling it? Not so much, I guess… 
After getting 人工 wrong, I also got 人口 wrong, using 人々 instead.
Now I am wondering, if I should incorporate this into my learning schedule as well, and if I should really do it right away, to further strengthen my Kanji knowledge. As the post suggests, it’s a question of goals; do I just want to be able to recognize, or do I also want to produce? If I go through my initial list of goals, 3 out of 4 goals (I listed 5 but actually, the first are focused on recognition (fluent reading, watching movies, JLPT) are actually recognition goals; not recalling. The last however is:
For me, it always feels like I only train my recognition and never my recalling; I learned French for a couple of years, and also Spanish; both some years/decades ago. Both used to be somewhere between the A2-B1 according to CEFR (never tested it, but that’s what the classes worked towards, and that’s how I would have assessed myself at that time). Today I manage to speak just a hand full of sentences, and these take really long to form and are riddled with small Grammatical errors. But I am always surprised, when I then get some text or hear to some audio and manage to understand much more than I would have expected - I just cannot reproduce or create it. For a while that was true for my English as well. For me, personally, I do not feel like knowing a language, unless I am also able to speak it; to converse with someone else. On the other hand, I don’t need this knowledge for most of what I would like to do, and I don’t have any chance of speaking or writing Japanese, as I don’t have any Japanese friends to practice with.
So incorporating KaniWani makes sense. However, on the down side this would be a third SRS that I need to track; I feel like this could be getting a bit much in the long run. To reiterate my plans:
- WaniKani: Do my reviews as soon as they become available (at least twice a day, at the start and the end) + learn 10 new items (or maybe reduce it to five, later on).
- Genki: Do review exercises for past sub-chapters of a lesson, learn one new sub-chapter (either a dialog or reading exercise (I’ll use them for listening + reading comprehension) or a grammar point), and add 10 new vocabulary items (plus possible example sentences for the grammar points) to Anki.
- KaniWani: 10 more items???
Feels like I’ll be spending 2+ hours a day - most of it for SRS reviews - if I want to keep up that pensum - and I am not sure if I can (always) make time for this. Hm… What to do?
First off, I’ll probably stick (at least) another week to just WaniKani; next week I am working regularly again (this week I had just one day, and the rest off). And then, when I feel more comfortable (and also start learning new things again that I haven’t seen before), I’ll add one of the two others… and maybe even both… in the end: Even though it was much more difficult, it was also kinda fun, doing KaniWani.