Randomly Reactivate Burned Vocabulary

[Noreladim]

A suggestion to the Crabinator from a level 9 student. Build into the WaniKani reviews a feature to randomly include some burned vocabulary words in the daily reviews. There are a LOT of burned words that I would not know the meaning of, or writing of, if shown to me today. If I was shown a burned vocab word and got it wrong in the daily review - then send it back to apprentice level so it gets included in the current review pile and has to work its way back up to burned status. What do you think?

[jerseytom]

Welcome aboard the community here.

For sure, there’s the “use it or lose it” effect and if you don’t see something for a long long time you’ll forget about it. Happens even in our native languages. But I’m not SRS’ing every single word I’ve ever learned in English. It’s okay to forget some words that I never see or use.

At some point I think there needs to be the delineation and hand off between WaniKani teaching something as well as it can, and the learner then using it in the wild. I just don’t think it’s the best use of time to drill everything indefinitely.

Beyond that, I think it’s good to have some sense of completion, whether it’s burning a card to advancing to a new level or whatever it might be. It’s a tangible feeling of success. Personally I’m not particularly interested in grinding through 200 reviews over a day, inching closer to L60 and the workload tapering off, only for Koichi to pop up with, “Ha ha! 里心 is back!! Better not forget that rendaku or it’s straight back to square one!”

[Aikibujin]

As someone who has reset their account 4 times now, I know exactly what you mean by forgetting old words.
As an alternative, you could open the list of words by level and just read through them and see if there are any you can’t remember and then unburn them as you go.

[plantron]

WK is not good at randomising things. They say that we should not do 1-to-1 reviews (meaning and reading back-to-back) because it’s not good for memorisation, but every time I do reviews I keep getting some items like that (without any userscript).

[Cheesypeesy]

There’s the self-study quiz script you can use to review only burned items if you fancy testing yourself. Then you can just resurrect any you get wrong.

[Q-P]

And the best place to test your mastery of burned items is out in the wild. The goal’s to get off Wanikani and into books and magazines and such, so the sooner you start looking for burns out there the better.

[HilbertXVI]

Well to be fair, truly random doesn’t have to look random at all. It’s like the iPod shuffle issue back in the day lol

[plantron]

Computers are not able to generate randomness, that’s why it’s called pseudo random number generator. But the problem of meaning and reading coming up back-to-back should be very easy to solve without any advanced calculation.