In 2020, 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.
This is the fifth thread documenting my challenge. You can read about my journey up to now in the previous four threads - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
The journey so far
I started this challenge on May 12th, 2021 with a mountain of 6218 reviews. I naively thought that I’d mostly remember everything and that I could get through all that in just a few weeks, but instead I could barely remember anything from the higher levels, and it was brutal and my review count actually kept going up. After a month in a half, with my reviews up to 6618, I gave in and ended up resetting from level 60 down to level 46.
Even after resetting, it still wasn’t easy, and my review mountain reached a post-reset high of 5319 before it finally started going down again.
Even after my review count peaked, it was slow going for a while. This time last year, I was still struggling to keep my review count under 5000. However, as you can see, my review count has rapidly declined this year, particularly in the spring and summer. I am now down to only 1357 reviews, and it finally feels like I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
My review speed has also increased significantly over the last year and a half. When I first started out, it was a huge slog since I couldn’t remember anything, and I was only getting through 1.5 reviews per minute. Even after resetting, it was only up to 2-3 reviews per minute. However, it has continued increasing, and I often now manage to hit 6 reviews per minute on average:
Of course, not everything has progressed so smoothly. My accuracy was of course terrible early on as well, and did go up a lot over time. However, after peaking around 83-85% this summer, it has now gone back down to 77% again. I suspect this is because I’ve burned so many of the easy items and a lot more of the remainder are leeches and unknown words. It’s still a bit frustrating though.
You can also see this effect in my counts of Apprentice, Guru, etc. over time. Recently, I’ve been burning tons of items, because a large fraction of the reviews coming up now are easy items that I previously got up to Enlightened and are finally coming up for burn reviews.
