Just a quick message to prevent the thread from locking after 30 days of inactivity. I’m still working on learning the ropes at work.
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Bump, still.
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I hope your (job) learning isn’t too overwhelming, we’re rooting for you to come back 
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@rhythm2107 Best of luck with the work situation! Our industry is one where work life balance is a broken see saw, but hopefully it’ll calm down as you ramp up.
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Thank you guys! I would say I’m doing quite good, my contract was extended and I am ramping up. Completed a few tasks here and there, moving around the cluster and debugging is no longer that difficult. Slowly starting to get a grip on Go, one of my recent tasks was actually to extend functionality of the operator (written in Go). I’m still far from being good at Go, it’s a steep learning curve for someone like me who’s self-taught and haven’t touched low level languages. The concept of interfaces is completely new to me, stuff like pointer receivers and the idea of no classes/inheritance whatsoever and just building types and assigning methods via pointer receivers. It’s a lot different, but I’m slowly getting there 
As for Japanese, I’ve been slowly chipping at the review count (which once peaked at over 1000) and burning things. Also failing things from Enlightened/Master and piling up a large Apprentice count due to that. I forgot a lot during this break, but still managed to burn quite a lot of things.
My last screenshot showed:
Whereas the current situation looks like this:
So my Apprentice & Guru stack went from 284 to 688, but my Burned stack also went from 4968 to 5587. Some things stuck, some things disappeared from my memory, but definitely progressing.
I made a decision to sign up for JLPT N4 (again) with my partner, and we’ll be taking it on December 7. I also made a very wishful goal of completing WK by the end of the year. The original plan was to finish by August and the backup deadline was end of the year. I didn’t make the first deadline, so lets see how the second one goes. Realistically though, I would need to maintain the same pace of one level per 8 days that I did before, while also juggling work, gym and JLPT N4 prep. I’m almost certain this is not happening, but I’ll give it a try and worst case end the year a few levels away from 60.
WK is not helping with my JLPT N4 prep though, considering that majority of kanji or vocab I’m learning now are actually N3/N2/N1. We’re printing out old tests and will sit down every Sunday to try to solve them, but aside from that I’ll definitely need to do a refresher of N5/N4 stuff. Might look for some Anki decks that focus on that, and I’ll definitely need to finish N4 on Bunpro and do some reading exercises.
Overall, I previously failed the N4 exam by only 2% (almost passed) and I had zero N4 grammar to my name. So I’m hoping for a better result this time. Failing would definitely put me in some heavy depression with Japanese
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I did some thinking and aiming for level 60 by the end of the year might not make too much sense, considering the JLPT N4 exam. Majority of the 40s, 50s contain kanji from N3-N1, and seeing my poor performance on a mock test I did yesterday, it’d make more sense to focus on refreshing early kanji, early vocab and finishing N4 grammar, then doing reading drills.
I’ll still do WK every day, but I might slow down to around 10 - 12 days per level instead, so that I have more time to dedicate to JLPT N4 prep. I’m roughly hoping to spend 10-14 days now on the current level, to re-remember the recent levels and push my Apprentice from 400~ to 20-50. Then I’ll resume leveling at the 10-12d pace, which should put me at around 53-55 at the end of the year.
I suppose after JLPT (Dec 7), I’ll be able to speed up again. For now I started mining vocabulary from mock tests, and also considering doing some N5/N4 Kanji/Vocab deck to refresh. Definitely considering Bunpro vocabulary, as it shows the vocab in context of a sentence so it would help with reading exam problems/stories. I’m also planning to complete the remaining 39 grammar points I have to do by the end of September.
If anyone went through this already and knows a good resource to refresh N5/N4 before the exam, please do share! 
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I’ve been doing daily Japanese and maybe missing a day here and there. I guess I overestimated how much time I’ll be able to dedicate to Japanese in general. I’m making steady progress, but Wanikani definitely took a back seat. While I do my reviews on WK daily and always zero them out, there’s no time to add some self-study sessions where I solidify leeches etc. And previously I often opened WK more than once a day which made it so leeches were sticking faster. So I’m still on 44, and will likely remain here for a week more before I actually start leveling.
Progress after 24 days on WK (since last update)
to…
Some things got burned, some fell back down. Apprentice looks much better, a lot of things already went to Guru 2, which is a good sign. Still having some leeches around Apprentice 1/2 but they got drastically reduced (256 → 77). My Apprentice+Guru count reduced slightly, but still relatively high (688 → 655). Luckily most of that is on Guru now, and a big portion was also some Master/Enlightened falling down that I had to re-remember.
There’s a lot of Enlightened coming back in the next days, so it will be interesting to see how many I burn.
For the most part though, my focus has been grammar, reading and mock exercises of JLPT N4. Every Sunday we do around 2 hours of JLPT N4 exercises, and note down grammar points & vocab that we need to mine and add to Anki. I haven’t yet made that Anki deck, I’ll do it once I’m finished with adding new points to Bunpro.
The original plan was to finish Bunpro N4 until end of September, and I am on track with that. Actually, the JLPT mock exercises often included grammar points that are marked as N3 on Bunpro, so I had to put some additional effort there.
Do not get me started on the keigo stuff, really glad it’s not that common on JLPT N4, but I am going to be in for some massive pain when N3/N2 exams come along.
Grammar is going relatively well. When I resumed, I was missing 37 points in N4 and 1 point in N5. Right now I’m missing 14 points in N4, so I progressed by 24 points. Also got a few points in N3 done, so actually it’s more like 30 total.
In general the plan is to:
- Max out N4 Grammar on Bunpro by end of the month
- Learn the N3 points on Bunpro that I notice on mock exercises as I go (every Sunday)
- Once Bunpro is maxed out, launch a cram session there with all grammar and 12 sentences per one. This will likely result in 3000~ reviews to complete, my goal is primarily to use this as a way to identify the “problem points”. But at the same time this works as good refresher of older ones that are high SRS and solidifying them. I’m also bookmarking problem points as I do reviews now.
- Once “problem points” are identified, make a list, group them together, and drill them hard. Some points are confusing to me mostly because they are synonyms/identical and often it’s about nuance or some specific rule that didn’t stick with me.
- Then after grammar is mostly resolved, I’ll be focusing on Shin Kanzen Master Reading book. I have a pdf of that and hoping to dedicate entire November to completing it from A to Z.
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