This was one of my most successful review sessions ever. The interesting part though is how 区 came up as both a kanji and vocab in the same review session. The kanji review came up first and I got the reading wrong, so I knew the right answer when it came up again as vocab.
In fact, I didn’t even notice that it was vocab instead of kanji at first. I thought it was just asking me the same question again and got shocked when the green “apprentice” popped up after answering, since I had previously put in the wrong answer. It’s funny how that works out sometimes.
If you count everything I’ve missed at least twice as a leech, then there are 131 leeches so far. For comparison, there are 279 items that I’ve gotten right at least twice so far.
It’s also interesting that according to these stats, the most that any single item has come up for review in the last two months was four times, and there are 13 different items that have come up for review four times so far.
I had an amazingly good day today, with unusually high accuracy (and number of reviews). However, I have an astonishing 135 new reviews arriving tomorrow, so my review count is likely to jump back up tomorrow no matter how hard I try.
Tue Jul 06 2021:
Time spent: 37m
Reviews completed: 108
Reviews remaining: 5154
Accuracy: 75.93% (82/108)
Accuracy on resurrected items: 98.31% (58/59)
Accuracy on non-resurrected items: 48.98% (24/49)
I decided to reset one last time (to level 46), mostly due to frustration over missing 瞬き yet again last night. However, this will the be last time I reset, because I already burned one of the level 45 items (cram school) and resetting again would delete that.
This time around, resetting barely made a difference in my review pile since most of the level 46 items were already at Enlightened and would only be coming due in a week or two. However, it does mean that the review pile at least will grow slightly more slowly than it otherwise would have other the next couple weeks. Anyway, here are the usual before and after stats:
That’s a punishing number of apprentice items you’ve got.
I had a 1000+ review queue years ago and I ended up writing a user script to make it easy to get back on track:
I can understand that you don’t want to reset further and so something like this script (there’s also Wanikani Reorder Ultimate 2) would help you a lot. In your current situation, the chance of items coming back at ideal SRS intervals is so small that you’re basically just wasting your time using WK.
Keep in mind that the majority of apprentice items are items I previously burned and resurrected, so it’s not as bad as it might seem. I don’t know what the ideal SRS intervals are, but neither does Wanikani, so that’s not terribly relevant. I will probably need to do extra practice of leeches outside WK at some point, but right now I’m focused on whittling down the review pile.
I’m finally starting to see more and more of the resurrected items graduate to Guru. Of course, there’s not many of them yet, since it requires the same item (out of thousands) to randomly come up for review four times (and me to get it right each time), but it’s only going to increase more over time.
Here are the current SRS levels for all the items I resurrected back in May:
As you can see, more than half (55%) of the items are still at Apprentice 1, meaning that either they haven’t come up for review yet, or I missed them when they did come up. But I’m definitely making progress.
Today was a huge day for reviews. I spent an astonishing 1.65 hours on Wanikani today, reducing my review count below 5100 for the first time ever!
More significantly, this is the first time that my six day review count has ever fallen below 5500, as far as I can recall. I’ve been tracking the number shown at the end of Wanikani’s six day review projection a lot. It’s a useful benchmark because it isn’t affected by apprentice reviews. I’ve been trying to reduce it below 5500 for a long time, but until today it’s mostly just been going up instead, and was recently well above 5600. It’s pretty crazy just how much progress I made today (keep in mind that Apprentice reviews won’t lower that number at all!)
Anyway, I spent quite a bit of time on Wanikani reviews today, just like yesterday. Yesterday I ended at 5076 with 131 reviews due today, so I had an uphill climb, but I was determined to try to get my review count under 5000 anyway, and in the end I just barely managed it.
(The fact it ended up at 4999 was pure luck - I wasn’t trying to count the reviews while doing them or anything, though I did plan to keep doing more review sessions until it went below 5000 or I gave up).
I also did an epic ~35 minute Bishbashonce session to do additional review of recently missed items, but I don’t count that since it wasn’t on Wanikani and doesn’t contribute to lowering the review pile. It was more just to try to refresh my memory of recent leeches. I don’t think it’s actually very useful though.
Anyway, I expect the review count to go up again a lot over the next couple days, because as it is now, I have to do an insane amount of reviews just to stay in place (there are 137 reviews coming in tomorrow) and I don’t have much time to spend on it on the weekdays, plus there’s a lot less motivation when I’m not trying to reach a new milestone.
Sun Jul 11 2021:
Time spent: 96m
Reviews completed: 266
Reviews remaining: 4999
Accuracy: 71.80% (191/266)
Accuracy on resurrected items: 86.36% (114/132)
Accuracy on non-resurrected items: 57.46% (77/134)
Wow! I just had my most successful review session ever. I got incredibly lucky. I couldn’t believe it as correct answer after correct answer came in.
I just randomly got almost all easy items that I already knew, and got lucky guessing in the cases where I wasn’t sure. However, I had no idea on 謙虚. I actually put “futility” for the meaning, but it still accepted it despite the right answer being “humility”, presumably because they were only a couple letters off. It’s so weird to have the luck go in my favor for once, compared to the usual common case where I miss a question that I had the right answer to due to missing synonyms.
Hello! Been checking this since you started but just posting now to cheer you on!
I know peeps have suggested you to reset (and you did, but not too low a level), but pushing through head on with your review pile feels like a silly endeavor but also inspiring! Looking forward to the day you zero them out! Cheers!
