My previous study log was closed due to inactivity, because as always I fell into the pattern of procrastination and burnout 
That said, it’s been four years since i joined Wanikani and I’m still only halfway. I feel like it’s about time to wrap this up and stop paying ransom to Kouichi 
I’m supposed to be in Japan end of 2025 for 2 weeks, so it’s yet another good reason to finally get to level 60 on WK. That and completing N5/N4 Grammar on Bunpro are my goals for Japanese for the next 1 year.
I’ll try my best to update this thread as I go with my progress 
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I’m on level 31 for 150 days now, and my dashboard looks like this right now.
I spent weeks working on leeches and burning things from 30 and below. My circulation of flashcards is pretty small now (only 800~). I am now doing a lot of self-study around leeches and once my Apprentice drops to 10-20~, I will resume leveling.
Few days ago that Apprentice was at 450~ so things are moving in the right direction!
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Entire day of studying, and leeches are slowly getting into my head.
Apprentice I is now only at 10 remaining too 
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Most of leeches are slowly moving up, still a few remaining at Apprentice I/II, so I’ll smack them on self-study a bit more today.
I also decided to start a Wanikani deck on Anki to:
- Refresh some of older kanji & radicals. Doing those leeches made me realize, that some of them were extremely easy like “品質” or “良質”. If you knew the meaning of kanji, you knew the vocabulary as it was just a combination. Extended breaks made me forget some kanji I already burned, so this will serve as a way to refresh them.
- Learn a few kanji for future levels per day (in order 31, 32, 33 […]). I don’t want to batch-learn 30 kanji in one day like I used to after leveling up. I’m gonna try to spread this out, and hope that it will also potentially increase my retention and speed of going through WK levels. This way, once I level up I should in theory already know the kanji for the level, but not the vocab. It should be easier to guru them and move to next level, while my WK focus will be to master vocab.
I split the decks into two, one for kanji/radicals I learned till now on WK, and one for future kanji. I did that with the idea in mind, that i could make my future kanji appear more often, while the older ones if they get recalled successfully, could be moved to a far interval (as I likely have no problem with that one).
I also reset my Bunpro progress, it had all N5 grammar learned (126/126) with most of them at Seasoned 2. I learned most of that in a rush before my N4 exam in July of 2022, and honestly don’t remember much of the grammar. So i reset the account there and decided to start over.
And yes, I attempted N4 without any N4 grammar knowledge I thought I’ll be able to learn N5 and N4 in time for exam, overestimated myself by an entire N4 grammar 
My plan for today is to go through the entire Anki deck and do all 1000 kanji that I previously learned. I’m not starting to learn the new kanji for level 31 yet on either WK or Anki, as I feel like this would get too confusing.
Wish me luck
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It’s actually much harder than I anticipated. I was hoping to do all cards first, and then deal with the Learning cards on Anki the next day, but unfortunately cards kept on coming back after clicking Again.
I could have buried them temporarily, but I just went along with it.
I successfully recalled around 45% of kanji that I burned on the first try, and recalling around 25% on 2nd try. A lot of these that I failed weren’t full fails, mostly I sort of knew what it is, but misspelled reading. For around 25% of burned kanji, I had this “tingling feeling” in my brain, that I sort of know it, but can’t recall it. So there’s some work to be done, that’s for sure.
Again, hoping to clear all 1000 cards today, so that they are scheduled to come back in the upcoming days. First 1-2 weeks of this Anki deck are probably gonna be a lot of work, so I might pause leveling to 32 on WK until Anki is under control.
On the Wanikani end, apprentice is down to 169 and majority of it is Apprentice 4.
Still dealing with a few leeches, but looking good
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Yesterday was rough.
It made me realize that tackling all of those 1000 burned kanji at once is not feasible. I attempted to go through the deck 3 times, and kanji that I successfully recalled after 3 times are left in Anki’s circulation. There’s around 300-350 kanji though, that I just couldn’t recall correctly, some of which I completely forgot (eh…).
Some of them are also very visually similar, and I keep mistaking them.
I decided to take a different approach and reset the 350 kanji I couldn’t learn, set 15 learn cards per day on that deck. So by end of December with consistent efforts, I should learn all the cards again, while also pushing some obvious/easy kanji far into the queue.
Meanwhile I’m learning Bunpro again, put some N5 grammar back into reviews.
I’m going through lessons one by one, reading & studying them again before I put them back into the review pile.
Something I wish Wanikani or at least the Flaming Durtles app had is the Bookmark that Bunpro does. I clearly struggled with one of grammar points today (the u-Verb Negative) and bookmarked it for further study. I know there’s the “leeches” option, but it’s not exactly the same. Leeches are the leftovers you keep failing on, but bookmarks would help you create custom study lists for things you personally think you need to work more on, would be useful for more active learning.
As for Wanikani, I did not expect that some of my kanji still wasn’t passed, so I got like 10-15 new vocabulary lessons. I’m guessing some kanji were moved down from higher levels, and I just only now passed them.
One of them was ご覧 and the description that suggested a phrase (ご覧になって下さい) instantly stuck with me. After watching anime for years, every now and then I see a vocabulary that I can instantly associate with some anime scene There’s been so many that used this expression, especially some scenes where things are being auctioned off.
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Short update with statistics.
My Anki Deck of old kanji/radicals:
Working on pushing most of guru to guru 2 and almost done with most of leeches in Apprentice.
Bunpro N5 progress so far.
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