Last year, I raced through Wanikani as fast as possible, reaching level 60, and then stopped after a year. However, I later realized that I had forgotten pretty much everything, so I resubscribed and attempted to start whittling down the pile of thousands of reviews I had accumulated.
I actually started this challenge way back in May, but I decided to start a new thread now, since the old one had gotten so long. You can see the previous threads here: Part 1, Part 2
The story so far
When I started, way back in May, I had 6218 reviews to get through. I naively thought that I’d mostly remember everything and that I could get through all that in just a few weeks. Boy was I in for a rude surprise.
Instead, I could barely remember anything, and doing reviews was like getting slapped in the face over and over and over. In fact, no matter how hard I tried and how long I spent doing reviews, my review count actually kept going up over time, peaking at 6618 before I finally gave in and reset my level.
At first, I reset my level from 60 to 48, which helped a lot, but still not enough. I ended up resetting again to 47, and finally to level 46. Below is a chart of my review count for the first 90 days, showing the count after each time I reset in a different color. As you can see, this was not a happy time for me.
After I reset for the last time (to level 46), my review count as “only” 5188. Reviews were suddenly a lot easier, but it still took months of hard work before my review count stopped climbing and started going back down again. In fact, my review count peaked at 5319 and didn’t start going back down until over three months into the challenge.
Below is a graph of my review count since I reset to level 46. As you can see, there have been a lot of ups and downs, but over time, I have slowly been making progress.
My current review count each night is shown in blue on the graph, and the reviews I have due in the next 7 days and next 30 days are shown in red and yellow, respectively. (I only started tracking these later on, so these lines don’t go back to the start.)
Anyway, that brings us to today, where I currently have a mountain of 4724 reviews awaiting me. I’ve barely done any WK for the last two weeks, but I’m hoping to start making a lot of progress again this weekend. Here goes nothing!
