Hi everyone! I’ve been doing WaniKani daily for one year and got to level 27 in that time, which somewhat correlates with my initial intent to finish it in 2 years. My average accuracy was floating around 88-92% up until last week, when I introduced timer script to my reviews. I noticed that after around lvl 20 my review sessions started to get much more longer and painful. For the first 20 lvls I was doing 15 lessons a day, then even tried 20 lessons for a few weeks but reverted back due to the amount of reviews accumulating. Past lvl 20, with an average review count around 180-210 items per day I felt WaniKani eating A LOT of my time and mental energy, I found myself not touching Genki 2 for a couple of months due to how much drained I felt after completing reviews and lessons. When I noticed this happening I reduced daily lesson count to 10 and couple months later I’m still having 180-210 review per day.
I wanted to prioritize studying grammar over learning Kanjis, so I did a quick analysis of what I needed to fix in order to do so and found that I tend to overthink about every single review item. When I encounter a kanji or a word that I can’t remember I’m starting to analyze each radical (which is how it’s supposed to go I think), then I either remember the mnemonic and the meaning/reading, remember just the mnemonic or don’t remember anything at all. And when I do so, I sometimes sit for minutes in an attempt to wring out anything out of my brain, because I heard that remembering things on your own builds stronger neuron connections. During the process I tend to drift away in thoughts and start to procrastinate which is increasing my review times to whopping 3-4 hours a day.
So last week in order to free up my time I decided to install a script which gives me only 20 seconds for an answer and automatically fails after that. I found 20 seconds to be just enough to do an analysis and come up with an answer, anything past it is just wasting my time. And it worked like magic, now I can do whole 200 reviews in one sitting just in one hour, the constant timer keeps my mind from drifting away and procrastination, but my accuracy is a victim in the result.
Just in one week my monthly average dropped to 84.78% which is “outside of learning zone”. I expect it to go even lower as much as 80% judging by my accuracy during reviews. And now I’m unsure what to do with it. I have an option of spending hours daily just to maintain good accuracy or keep to this 20 second limit and constantly thinking that I’m not learning anything cause I’m outside of learning zone. It’s also somewhat demotivating knowing that there are people doing their reviews just in 30 minutes and maintaining 100% accuracy, just makes me wonder what the hell is wrong with my brain.
So I come here in order to get some perspective and some thoughts from others or maybe even professional teachers. Should I remove the timer in order to give myself more time to come up with an answer and maintain accuracy? Or this approach of “calculating” or sometimes even guessing the answer is not helpful?
Thank you all for your time and attention if you read up until this point, I know this was a wall of text.
To be honest, personally, I don’t focus on accuracy at all, because I know that when I will know something i Will write it correctly. You are still learning % of the material that feel at home in you head. Some things are just harder. I still have problem with some basic vocab from first levels, and me and my teacher don’t know why my head doesn’t want to remember these specific words but some harder one without any problem. Last 28 days I have 87,87%, but last month I had 70% and now Mastered almost all those elements.
BUT I am never spedning more time than… 5 seconds on one answer and sometimes wonder if maybe I should sometimes spend more time to maybe try to find a readin/meaning, idk
i think the two best things you can do for accuracy are going to be 1) within WK, do the “review recent mistakes” activity with some regularity. when I’m finding that some new cards are just not sticking, giving them a little extra attention is what helps, and 2) outside of WK, read more! at level 27, you’ve gotten enough exposure to kanji to read any of the Tadoku graded readers or a full-furigana manga.
reading between the lines, it sounds like you’re trying really hard, and that this is exhausting for you. If that’s the case, you might consider keep doing WK, but try way less hard. Just get the thing wrong if it’s not coming and move on—maybe a helpful perspective could be that it’s actually the SRS system which is the thing that’s doing the work of making a card stick in your memory, not you, you’re just doing these lil flashcards.
For me, my perfectionism comes through strongest in reading. I want to really grok a text fully. I wanna know every little grammar nuance, I want 100% comprehension of the vocabulary, etc. But in English (my native language), I don’t do that, and sometimes I don’t have those things either. So as much as I possibly can, I’m trying to keep moving forward, read things at a feelsbad 80% or lower comprehension and hope that 1) that’ll change as I read more (it has and it will), and 2) if I care to really grok something, I have time to read it again at another time (again, so far that seems to be true).
Thank you for your reply! I already considered making more time for practice and actual immersion, but first wanted to finish second Genki textbook (I’m on lesson 20 out of 22). Thanks to your reply I already checked the Tadoku website and it looks very promising. I’ll start my first graded reader today! Are their free books sufficient enough or should I consider buying some?
For Tadoku I would recommend to stick with the free offering. I think that is sufficient. After you are satisfied with them, I would rather migrate to easier native material (look into the absolute and beginner book clubs here for example). Or if that still feels to hard do some time on Satori reader instead. I think that is a better usage of funds.
I do second that reading is really important to cement the reading (and sometimes meaning) of some Kanji, but especially the vocabulary here on WaniKani.
My suggestion is to remove the ‘learning zone’ widget and stop fussing over your review accuracy. If you feel overwhelmed by the items in your reviews, do fewer lessons. If you feel good, do a few more lessons. Plus, practice reading like other people have suggested to see kanji in context.
If at first you succeed, you’ll never learn from your mistakes.
Personally I don’t care too much about accuracy - it’s a reflection of how well I am doing on the reviews, sure, but I’m NOT on wanikani learning kanji and vocabulary to be able to do well at reviewing them, it’s so I can actually know them. If I fail a review, it means that item isn’t at a point yet where I know it well enough for it to progress, so if it needs extra time, even a LOT of extra time as occasionally happens, that’s fine.
I actually like that idea of the 20 second timer. I actually tend to go the other way, I have the retry scripts so occasionally I’ll put the wrong thing once or twice but if I actually know it, I might still let it be correct - especially when I’m in my 5-6 review/minute pace. I’ll also deliberately fail something if I get the meaning marked correct when it’s not.
The point of this is the accuracy and learning zone stuff is not individually tailored. Find what works for you and if you think the 20 seconds script and resulting lower accuracy is better for your leanring goals than worrying about the accuracy measure, then that’s right for you.
I also use this script for correcting mistypes or something that was marked correct when it should’ve been wrong.
What I’m not sure about, is whether I should use it in situations when I shot out a wrong answer without really thinking about it, but then took a look at the kanjis for merely a couple of seconds and knew the answer.
Or when I enter regular か instead of が for example or vice versa, I used to retry my answer so that it was marked correct, but I’m abandoning this behavior now cause while it sounds almost similar it’s a completely different word and I don’t want to reinforce in my memory that these mistakes are ok.
