Rhythm's Study Log

[rhythm2107]

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

[rhythm2107]

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!

[rhythm2107]

Entire day of studying, and leeches are slowly getting into my head.

Apprentice I is now only at 10 remaining too

[rhythm2107]

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:

1. 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.
2. 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

[rhythm2107]

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

[rhythm2107]

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.

[rhythm2107]

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.

[rhythm2107]

Another update, slowly progressing through everything.

Anki

I actually started learning Kanji for level 31 on Anki, but haven’t yet started doing reviews on Wanikani for them.

Wanikani
Apprentice looking really good, half of it is leeches that I’m still working on, and the other half are some old Enlightened that I forgot after coming back, that initially dropped to Guru 2 and now came back and dropped again. A lot of Guru I went to Guru II as well, with a lot of Guru/Master reviews coming in the next few days.

Bunpro
Halfway through with N5 Grammar. I’m bookmarking the points that are causing me issues, one clear issue I’m facing right now are grammar points that revolve around “but”, like が, けれども, から, だから, ので. It’s on my list to go over them again and find a good place that compares them, as it’s getting confusing for me when I should use each one.

I plan to complete all of 126 points, then take a month or two on maxing out my understanding of these, before I start N4.

Satori Reader
I actually bought a subscription recently, using it only for fun when I have some more time and want to read something in Japanese. It’s a struggle, some episodes are taking me like 10 to 15 minutes to go through.

I set some goals for myself for this one year of “productivity”, for all aspects of my life (business, japanese, gym, studying, social etc.). I did that two weeks ago already, but today I specified exactly what I need to do in order to “complete” them. For japanese specifically I gave myself 3 goals:

• Wanikani Level 60
• Bunpro N5 & N4 Grammar, reaching 212 grammar points (70%) to Streak 8 level.
• Anki, reaching interval of 30 days on at least 2000 cards (90%) from new & old WK deck

I didn’t include Satori Reader in this, as I don’t want to overwhelm myself. Small steps, building habits. If I can go through the above 3 points, then the year is already a successful one in my book

[rhythm2107]

Quick update, just leveled to 32 after spending 360 days on level 30, and 160 days on level 31. Let’s hope no more burnouts till 60!

I’m back to leveling and about to add level 32 kanji from lessons, so this is probably the lowest my apprentice will be for a loong time.

Edit:

Apparently I joined Wanikani on this day 4 years ago. I’ll take this as a reminder that it’s time to wrap it up

[rhythm2107]

That was a lot of vocab lessons. I’m trying to find some comfort in higher WK levels, having less vocab per level. As i progress through 30s and 40s, the workload should in theory start reducing around level 45. Then again, those are fast levels and knowing me, I’ll want to speed them up a little.

Yesterday I started going over level 32 kanji on Anki. My old kanji & radical deck on Anki is getting a little out of control, so I might stay on level 32 for a few days longer than necessary, just to let my Anki deck calm down a little.

Haven’t done any new grammar points on Bunpro for almost a week now, primarily because of the old kanji & radical deck.

The average interval is steadily growing, but FSRS in Anki seems to ignore the intervals a little. Some cards that were supposed to come in 3 weeks appeared much earlier.

Still have some new cards to add to circulation, so it’ll be hectic with Anki until early January i guess.

Dashboard Progress
2 Weeks Ago

Now

Another cool statistic, average level of Bunpro grammar points.

There’s 12 points maximum, so it’s 4.74 average out of 12 right now.
I think within a year it’s only possible to reach 10th or 11th, as the last one intervals are quite long.

[rhythm2107]

Today was finally the day I got overwhelmed with Anki. My old kanji & radical deck right now, consists of 800 kanji in circulation. When you learn on Wanikani, you learn 35 kanji, then they go to higher SRS and, you level up and learn another 35. This batch approach makes it so, very often the similarly looking kanji are so far apart in SRS stages, that they don’t interfere with each other. Some visually similar will be burned, by the time you learn one that looks almost the same.

This made it painfully clear for me, that having 1000~ or 2000~ kanji in circulation when reading is a completely different beast, and this Anki deck is not as easy as I thought initially. I was hoping to just speed run through it and hammer them back into my head, but it’s clear I actually need to study some of them thoroughly again.

So, I disabled new cards in that deck for now. I was getting 15 new cards per day, along with the reviews that came back. Previously I would push myself harder, make myself spend more time to meet the deadline I set for myself, but I now think that’s just plain unhealthy. It’s fine to underestimate a task. I acknowledge that if i push myself here, I’ll likely push myself to burnout, so I need to re-evaluate new deadline and continue at the same, reasonable pace I was doing till now.

In the last few days I was getting 100 reviews on Anki daily and the 15 new cards to re-learn. I’ll pause new lessons until my daily reviews reduce to around 30, then resume. Maybe this also opens up some more time for me to start doing Bunpro grammar points again.

[rhythm2107]

Last few days are making me realize that it was the right call to pause new cards for the Anki deck. I’m currently at a 8-8.5 day pace to level from 32 to 33, meaning I should level around 20th Dec.

Just did my lessons for the first batch of Guru’ed kanji from 32.

Anki is consistently giving me around 100-120 reviews daily, which is a lot right now, considering Anki was supposed to be just an additional thing and not the primary focus. It’s currently taking me as much, if not more time than Wanikani is, which wasn’t the plan.

I’ll sit on this old Anki deck without new cards for as long as needed, and only resume the remaining 190 cards once things calm down. It got so overwhelming that i stopped learning future levels kanji ahead-of-time. Today is my first day where I’m learning 5 new kanji from level 33 (before I even get there).

The goal was to be around 2 levels ahead with kanji by the time I’m leveling, so if i’m about to level to 33, then I’d like to already have gone over level 33 and 34 kanji in my Anki, and learning 35.

The purpose of this ahead-of-time deck is that learning kanji once you level is just simply inefficient if you take in the system Wanikani uses. You either have to spend 2-3 hours to really learn all 35 kanji~ in one go, or you learn 5 kanji per day and delay your leveling by easily few days.

Current Plan:

• Chill out with Anki OLD deck and push the cards into mature/higher intervals
• Continue leveling Wanikani at pace of 8 to 9 days per level
• Continue bunpro to reach the 126 grammar points
• Stop Bunpro at 126/126 N5 points for at least a month or two, push cards to higher intervals and bookmark leeches & grammar points i struggle with
• Spend 2-3 days in different weeks to go over my weak grammar points and further study from different sources than Bunpro (in order to reinforce them and get them off leech status)
• Continue learning 5 kanji per day for Anki Future deck
• Once Bunpro is 126/126 and Anki Old is low review count, speed up the Anki Future deck to get ahead of Wanikani by 2-3 levels
• Only consider resuming Anki Old deck, once Bunpro is 126/126 with low daily reviews, Anki Future is 2-3 levels ahead, and other areas like WK aren’t overwhelming me

[rhythm2107]

Anki deck is slowly calming down, last two days only 80 and 60 cards came back.

As for Wanikani, leech situation isn’t looking bad. There definitely still are cards that drop down from Guru+ and become problematic. But after reading about some SRS study, that 10% of your lowest interval cards contribute to a 300% increase in your workload, I decided to do short self-study sessions in which I focus on Apprentice 1 and Apprentice 2. I only do those once per few days or when it’s clear some cards are causing me problems, and they don’t take me long either (maybe 20 minutes tops).

So far that’s working out, apprentice 1 and 2 has been in single digits for some time now. I should be leveling to 33 tomorrow, though some vocabulary from first batch of level 32 kanji, are still around Apprentice 3. Some of them are a bit weird and confusing, but slowly forward.

I had some more time to use Bunpro recently. I wasn’t supposed to start N4 yet, but the “synonyms” option on Bunpro caught my attention, and I thought learning a very similar grammar point at the same time could be a good idea sometimes (especially if they are both explained and compared in each of the lessons). I did that for two N4 points so far, there was one N2 one that I was considering learning too, but the sentences were next-level

I will probably take it a bit easier in a few days to try and enjoy holidays, but still hoping to finish the 126 grammar points by end of December.

Leveling to 33 tomorrow, meant that I had to catch up on my future kanji deck in Anki. I only was halfway through the level 33 there, so I took around 30-40 minutes to learn the entire level.

Not gonna lie, maintaining this pace while trying to juggle gym, coding, business, relationship, family and going out is a bit crazy. There are moments where I feel i got no time to chill, which is not good and after completing N5 grammar, I might consider slowing down a bit. I think instead of aiming for 8 days per level on WK, aiming for 10 days is more reasonable. As for grammar, I want to reach the point where I can learn through exposure (reading) as soon as possible, even with the simplest stories / mangas. I’m really enjoying the 5 cards per day on Future Kanji Anki deck of mine, and I think doing something similar for N4 grammar points like setting a goal of 2 or 3 lessons per day would be a solid plan too.

Final Note
I did say that it does feel a bit crazy and overwhelming sometimes, but it also does feel incredible that I have days during which I complete everything I set out for myself. And very often, I set a lot of tasks. This is only because near middle of November, I decided to drop video games altogether. I was clearly addicted to them and played them even during times, when I knew i had something else to do. I would easily get hooked on a game for months and disregard to some extent rest of my life. This study log is partially to keep myself accountable, but also to keep myself a little more “sane”, through this transition period and a new chapter of my life.

I can’t stress enough how much I appreciate, that some of you read these long posts of mine and leave a like on them. It does make me feel like I’m not alone in this, and motivates me to keep going. So thank you, internet strangers

[araigoshi]

It’s good you’ve found a system to let you clear your SRS workload a little, I was catching up on study logs on the forums last night and saw your 231 apprentice items in the last update and was honestly wondering how you cope with that many, I always used to feel the pressure around 150.

[rhythm2107]

It’s helpful that my Master and Enlightened are both below 200 right now, so it’s only Apprentice and Guru that i’m dealing with most of the time. I think in 8-10 levels, when my Master and Enlightened are much higher, and my Apprentice/Guru still looks the same, i’ll be in trouble

Around that time I plan to either slow down, or completely stop leveling until it’s easier again.

[rhythm2107]

I just leveled to 33 too, took me 7.9 days. After doing new kanji & vocab lessons and zeroing them out, my apprentice is now at 192.

[rhythm2107]

Christmas was busy, so I took a few breaks from Anki and Bunpro. Haven’t done any reviews for 3 days there, but I mostly kept going with Wanikani. Just leveled to 34 today, took me 8 days and 21 hours. I’m now back to being more active again, so hoping to keep up the 8 day per level pace, going forward.

Some leech vocab is coming back and not sticking with me, so I’ll have to do a self-study session today, most likely. I luckily already went over level 34 kanji on my future Anki deck, so learning those won’t be hard today. Just finished all new vocab lessons, and my apprentice looks awful because of that

My N5 Bunpro is stuck at 101/126, with 25 lessons remaining. I’m going to try pushing 10-12 lessons there today, so that I can complete 126 before end of the year. January will be my time to reinforce N5 grammar, and re-study with other resources, grammar points that I struggle with.

The old Anki deck is slowly, starting to look better.

I increased my future Kanji deck from 5 to 6 daily lessons, and hoping to increase it to 10 eventually. I’ll probably do it gradually, might increase it to 7 in early January. I’d love to first go through the remaining 194 old kanji that aren’t yet in card circulation. Then once that’s done, and that deck is also managable, I’ll start increasing my future kanji higher. I’d love to finish level 60 kanji on Anki, around the time I hit level 45 on WK. That’s the beginning of fast levels, and I’m hoping to speed up the pace around that time. Having no more new lessons in Anki deck would free up a lot of my time for Wanikani, and maybe then I could push for 4-5 day levels from 45 to 60.

Might have to take a 2-3 week break, before starting 45 to 60, so that Apprentice/Guru is low count. So far so good though

[rhythm2107]

Short update, just finished N5 Grammar on Bunpro

Ended the year with 120 points, finished the last 6 today. As planned, I’ll be taking a break from learning new points on Bunpro, to solidify the N5 points in my head. My plan is to find and read a N5~ level manga and to go over all my bookmarked/leech points on Bunpro. I’ve got 36 of 126 points bookmarked, some of which I already have a good grasp of, but didn’t at the time of bookmarking. I’ll give cram option on Bunpro a try, and if that’s not enough, then I’ll use some other resources to reinforce them in my head.

Since Bunpro should get a bit easier now, I enabled 5 new cards per day on the old “refresher” deck for kanji. Still 184 to go, hoping to finish this deck in the next 3 weeks~, hopefully before end of the month.

[rhythm2107]

Finally found time to do a self-study on leeches & new vocab from 34. At the beginning of this one year challenge, I was doing self-study for leeches every second day. I didn’t do one for 2 weeks now, mostly due to Christmas & New Years period being busy. It was clear, I had some leeches that were coming back non-stop to apprentice, so it’s good I tackled them today.

I first did each of Apprentice (1, 2, 3) to 100% accuracy, separately. Then I combined them all into one self-study session and aimed for 90% accuracy. Got this on my first try

I’m hoping that’s gonna be enough to push those leeches back to Guru/Master.

As for old deck of Anki, I took a new approach and checking how many reviews I’ll have tomorrow. If it’s 50 or more, then I do only 5 new cards. If it’s less than 50, then I do 10 new cards.

Slowly going through the remainder of old kanji:

I’m aiming to finish new cards in the old kanji deck by end of the month.

[rhythm2107]

Reached level 35 today, keeping up the 8 days~ average per level.

Completed all the lessons, binged kanji as they were already learned on Anki. I’m currently one full level ahead on Anki, so that’s going great. My daily workload on Anki is previous reviews + 7 new kanji from future deck + 5 old kanji from old deck.

I am slowly approaching a moment in which I’ll need to dedicate more time to my business & work. So I decided to speed up Anki and dedicate some more time to it.
Seems like a perfect moment to do so:

• Wanikani is still not overwhelming with the amount of circulating cards (this will probably become rough in a month or two, where I got all those cards but no burns from this recent leveling yet)
• Bunpro N5 is reached and I’m not learning new points yet, so less workload there
• Gonna need to spend more time on business soon, so upping workload on Anki later will not be possible

I raised the daily future kanji to 8 per day, and the old deck to 10 per day. I’ll be monitoring my old deck now, to see if it doesn’t get overwhelming too quickly. But i’ll also do more reviews in Anki and maybe some leech, self-study sessions to remember the cards better.