Should I restart my WaniKani progress?

WaniKani Requesting Help
1

I spent quite a long time learning Kanji, maybe 4 years+. Then I moved to Japan and lived here for 2 years. I was too busy and stopped learning Kanji and doing my WaniKani reviews. Now I’ve forgotten most of the Kanji I learned (though I do surprise myself and others sometimes). What do you think? Should I restart from 0? And how do you keep up your Kanji? Should I be reading regularly in addition to doing my Kanji lessons?

please help :bowing_man::smiling_face_with_tear:

2

Don’t start over. Just start up again and read every day

Do as many reviews and lessons as you feel comfortable with. Consistency will be your friend

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3

No. Just review and don’t add anything until you feel ready to progress forward.

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4

Thanks for your advice. I guess Im worried about Kanji I previously burned and now I can’t remember. Do you think reading and revising is enough to bring those memories back?

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5

Thanks for your advice. Just curious, have you had similar experience?

6

Yes. The first year I did WK. I got super burned out and then just stopped. Attempt 2 had the most success as I just had days or weeks where I wasn’t in the mood but still put in my reviews. Once I felt the itch to progress again, I started up again.

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7

I would consider not resetting, keeping the status quo, trying to clear out the review pile. (Not sure if you have big reviews. Vacation mode?)

The reason being, I don’t expect much from WaniKani lower levels. Higher levels too. Mid levels might not be too bad.

The best alternative to WaniKani at this point, IMO, is reading and mining for vocabularies or Kanji for a few months – add to SRS, like Anki, or just learn without SRS.

But for Kanji-wise, my recommendation is lower than mining, but it can be done by browsing Wiktionary.org, add to SRS, and look up cross-reference in Weblio, Kanjipedia, or just Google. (ALC and Weblio/Goo JE are alternative cross-references.)

Closest alternative to Anki is kitsun.io. Other alternatives include KameSame and jpdb.io.

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8

Thanks. I have a big pile of reviews, ~1600. But it doesn’t bother me too much. I cleared it once 2 years ago and I think I could do it again if it had to. I think my general lack of reading ability / slowness / inability to recognise kanji is what annoys me the most and was making me think of restarting. Especially because before I took a break I wasn’t perfect, but I remembered much more than I do now.

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9

Mmm; at some point you need to either stop using SRS and take the “just read” approach, or else shift to an SRS that can grow with you and help you with the words and kanji you’re actually encountering. Maybe now is that point?

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10

I am not doing Japanese SRS at all currently. My hands are already full with Chinese.

Even before Chinese SRS, I was only doing Japanese reading SRS and also not every day.

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11

Thanks for your suggestion! I definitely think I need to read more. What would you do if you came across a Kanji you should know but forgot when reading? Add it to an SRS program or review it in WaniKani?

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12

Personally I don’t study individual kanji – I learn and SRS words, and I find the kanji take care of themselves. I also use anki and jpdb, not wanikani. What I do when I encounter something I don’t know depends a bit on what it is:

  • if it feels like it was just a momentary lapse of memory, I might do nothing and trust that just the act of having to look it up this time and then the reinforcement from when it appears in future reading will be enough
  • if it seems like a super obscure word I might also ignore it on the basis that putting the time into other words will be more efficient
  • otherwise I add it to the queue of words to learn in jpdb (I have a steady pace of 10 new words a day; I prioritise words I actively found in the wild but otherwise fill in with words from the jpdb decks I’m working on)
  • if it turns out that the word was already in my jpdb set of stuff I supposedly know, I don’t do anything special to try to tell the system I need to study it more – I just let it continue normally through the srs progression

If you do your reading electronically you can optimise your workflow to make on the fly dictionary lookups and adding new words to an srs queue very quick. I do my reading on paper, though, so have no specific advice there.

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13

No.

I suggest this course of action:

  • Do your reviews. (Use Tsurukame or something like it if possible, so you don’t get penalized for typos and really hurt for items you are somewhat familiar with, etc.).
  • Use WK stats once your Apprentice pile gets super high to see where those items are…
  • Consider resetting a few levels at a time to get your Apprentice Levels comfortable.
  • Most likely, resetting to somewhere in the 20s or 30s or so will be sufficient.
  • You’re here in Japan, so most of the lower content (and even some of the higher content) will be commonplace…
  • You might even just take a look at the levels pages to see what you recognize/know and what you completely forget.
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14

Thanks for your advice. I like it how your relying on SRS to learn words, I feel like it simplifies the approach somewhat. I think I’m going to take this approach, mixed with some advice from previous posts:

  • Not reset progress.
  • Restart WaniKani reviews and only do what I can (probably only 5 mins a day at the moment :sweat_smile:).
  • Read daily, even if it’s just 1 page.
  • Add Kanji I don’t recognise / forgot to an SRS program and start revising them. I can probably only manage this one 1-2x a week…
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15

Thank you everyone for your advice and input. I really appreciate it. It was also great to hear what you are doing to progress, and I think the approach of doing only what you can, is helpful. I selected a “solution” because I’m a noob to these forums and I felt like I had to, but in reality I’ve taken advice from many of the posts. So thanks again. And if you have any further advice or tips, feel free to drop them in the chat.

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