Script to 'unlearn' or otherwise just get rid of leeches?

Is there a script that would just move my leeches out of my review queue and put them somewhere else so I can study them in a different way later?

Or ‘unlearn’ vocab items and hide them, so I don’t get any credit for progressing them but later on when I’ve got through the levels I can come back and learn the weird and awful vocab on its own?

I have too many words where the mnemonic doesn’t help at all and all they do is clog up my reviews. It’s draining my patience and enjoyment in learning.

As far as I know there are no scripts that can do that.
You can use something like the extra study feature to help reinforce them. You can also create your own mnemonics, or just share which ones you’re struggling with, and the community can help you come up with some good ones.

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There might be a script that move selected items to the end of the Review queue, then cut off before doing such items, but I can’t remember the script exactly.

Perhaps I would prefer more of “Unlearn”, or moving back to Lesson queue, but such feature has been requested for a while, but never granted.

Nonetheless, it might be a better idea to showcase your leeches. If someone can help or is helpful, you will know.

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There is the Wanikani Later Crabigator script that moves items to the end of the queue. that doesn’t put them back into lessons or make them disappear from future review sessions.

OP I think it’s best to accept that you will acquire leeches. A LOT of them making your way to lv 60.

It’s best to just realize that for every level you do, there will be a handful of items that are harder than the rest. But, putting a bit of extra effort continuously using the Extra study “recent mistakes” and the Self-Study Quiz or Item Inspector, and you shouldn’t get overwhelmed by their number.

Reviewing leeches only is often pretty depressing as you start to forget that you actually have capacity for learning, even though these items tend to be slippery and unmemorizable almost. ^^; Mixing it up with “normal” reviews is defo preferable, so you can see your own improvements, even as you also struggle at times. Just my own opinion.

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I cannot preach this enough. Getting an incorrect answer on a leech is the worst, and the only thing softening the blow is looking at my overall percentage. Leeches are the worst! :tired_face:

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I understand the sentiment in your collective responses and thanks for taking the time to reply. I’m a little sad that the only way out is grind, but I guess that’s always been a feature of second language acquisition, especially for vocabulary, and especially in Japanese.

I get ‘leeches’ all the time in my native tongue and that’s after speaking it for 40 years and having a very extensive passive vocabulary from years of study, research and knowledge work. I cannot for the life of me recall what ‘heuristic’ means, for example, and have to look it up nearly every time I encounter it, and that’s fine. The reason I can never remember what it means is that I don’t use it in my daily life, or even all that often. That’s why we have dictionaries.

SRS is a good analogue for learning through context, but it’s not the same thing, and it’s much more efficient and useful to learn leeches “in the wild”, through encountering them in context and using a dictionary. However, I think it’s a little short-sighted of the developers not to allow such a feature, as it would support good practice in language acquisition, which includes reading and self-directed study.

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I`m up to like 70% of my time spent on leeches. Daily progress starts at 250 reviews…

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I’ll have a think about showcasing them (in another thread perhaps), tbh a little while ago I started just cheating on them using the iPhone app I use to do my reviews, just to clear them out and stay focussed. But I’ve been patchy about that.

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I feel pretty similarly. I’ll either finally nail my leeches with real life contexts or they’ll be unimportant enough that looking them up repeatedly is fine.

I use the later gator script already shared to put my leeches at the end of the queue while I leisurely try to diminish my reviews. I’m focusing on reading instead of WK and only doing about 100 reviews a day which is gradually reducing my reviews over the weeks.

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Yeah I’ve started reading too, and it’s great that WK study means I can recognise a lot of the Kanji I see, but it’s equally frustrating that I don’t recognise the vocab I’m encountering because it just didn’t make it into WK. An example - on the first page of the Evangelion Manga I encountered the word 落下 - which I could read but still needed a dictionary for. It uses no kanji over level 10 but also uses the らく reading of 落, which is otherwise only in vocab from level 18 and later (mostly 44 and later) and has come as a rude and annoying shock, producing a leech for me in 落書き.

This is one of the major reasons I really don’t think grinding leeches is a good way out of this problem; WK clearly chooses its vocab for reasons that are related to readings and meanings and not necessarily frequency or coverage, and it’s not like WK obviates use of a dictionary anyway.

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There are differing opinions on whether to study Kanji ahead of Wanikani. But then, if you aren’t certain whether it would take a long time to reach level 60, nor you are overloaded; it would probably worth it.

Also even for Wanikani Kanji themselves, some readings may be skipped, particularly On readings; some meanings may be omitted as well. So, it might worth it to figure out how to study Kanji, for now or later.

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