Should I start again?

So a couple of months ago quit Wani Kani, actually, I lost motivation and thought that I would study at Genki.

But actually, I refound my motivation through Japanesepod101 I gave the platform a try and it enormously helped with refocusing, grammar, reading & listening, etc…

Do you think I should start to slowly pick up Wani Kani again and drop 15 levels? Because I actually burned myself with such a big workload by skipping all the vocab and only focusing on kanji.
Basically abusing scripts.

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I recently went back 5 levels after struggeling for a year with the huge amount of open reviews. It really paid of for me as I already got one of those levels and all my motivation back :slight_smile:

I’m not sure if our resets can be compared, but if you find yourself overwhelmed with the amount of reviews you’d have to constantly do to get back to full speed, I’d recommend not wasting as much time as I did :wink:

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Get rid of all scripts and don’t skip vocab, otherwise why are you even learning another language?

That is a good idea to drop a few levels and start up again.

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Yes. :grin:

More nuanced answer: Assuming you want to learn to read Japanese, then yes, absolutely. If your goal is to claim internet points by quickly attaining higher Wanikani levels, then maybe not.

You seem to already recognize the pointlessness of skipping vocabulary. To me, “vocabulary” is the entire point of this site: you learn radicals to help distinguish and memorize kanji so that you can read Japanese vocabulary when you see it in the wild.

(Doubtless, someone will point out that WK aims to teach readings for the characters, not to build vocabulary, but I’d argue they aren’t thinking far enough ahead: If you learn the various readings/nuances and understand how characters intermix, you’ll eventually learn to read vocabulary that isn’t taught on WK as well.)

To me, memorizing a single reading and single, un-nuanced meaning for a few hundred characters seems more like stamp collecting than learning a language. Understanding how those characters are used to communicate is much more interesting.

If you’re serious about learning to read Japanese, then by all means reset to a lower level and commit to at least daily reviews for the next couple of years.

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I understand the sentiment, but that seems a bit harsh. I’ve found many scripts invaluable to my own learning.

Personally, I’m not a fan of scripts that affect behavior (things like re-ordering and correcting “typos”) but there are many wonderful scripts that just distill raw data into actionable information to assist your learning. (FWIW, about the only “action” that you should vary is how many lessons you choose to do each day). And even the behavior-oriented scripts I dislike may make sense for some people (re-ordering makes sense if you have to work through a huge backlog, for example).

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If your goal is to claim internet points by quickly attaining higher Wanikani levels, then maybe not.

Gamer mentality was to much focused on leveling, haha.

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I also like the script where I can choose to do x amount of lessons or reviews for better focus.

I never know the kanji well enough to recognize and read them in the wild until I go though the vocabulary. What you say is true about learning how to read. Just the kanji without context is pretty useless. I’m starting to think these death and hell levels are named like that because they skimp on the vocab :laughing: Makes things much harder.

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My feeling is that you should do all outstanding reviews every day (getting the queue to zero at least once every day). To me that’s inviolate: the SRS doesn’t work if your reviews are sporadic. (Of course, real life happens and everyone misses a day here and there, but the goal must be EVERY DAY.)

Lessons, on the other hand, are completely under your control. They control how long it will take and how difficult you’ll find the process. I view doing lessons exactly like pressing on the accelerator in my car.


(Apologies, but the analogy amuses me. It’s exactly like the accelerator on your car … if it took weeks or months for the injected fuel to reach the engine! The trick with lessons is to realize that pressing too hard today can cause pain weeks and months into the future.)

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I think ‘yes’. I had a two year break from WK, forgot so much, so dropped back 20 levels from level 25 to level 5. Right now I’m back to level 24. Going through twice has given me a much more solid foundation. And discovering which kanji I remember easily and which I never seem to remember, even the second time around, has helped me think about ways to be a better learner. Lucky I took a lifetime membership early on. I really do it to suit myself. Eg, I took about three months off Lessons recently so I could get things through to Enlightened or Burned. That way I don’t feel swamped by mounting reviews.

So yeah, no rush.

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Don’t just take Rrwrex’s word for it, here it is straight from the WankiKani Knowledge Guide

If you try WaniKani, you’ll be able to complete the incredibly simple task of learning ~2,000 kanji (both meaning and reading) and 6,000+ Japanese vocabulary words. In order to do this, all you need to do is:

  1. Do your available Lessons.
  2. Do your reviews.
  3. Do them every day, without fail. Probably even on Christmas.

“Simple” does not mean easy. The word “easy” is a word copywriters use to get you to buy their language learning product, be it textbook, audio program, or app. But, if you actually want to learn something, and learn it to real fluency… it’s going to be hard.

There are good reasons to limit reviews, but general speaking it’s not something a normal user should be doing frequently. If I had to word it a little differently, do each review within 24 hours of it becoming available. I think some scripts have a variation of this as prioritizing overdue items.

The Lesson → Accelerator analogy is also pretty good, but I’d probably say it’s more of a truck than a car. With the way the SRS intervals are structured here Apprentice 1 → Guru 1 or Guru 2 is more than half of the intervals, but take around a week to get results.

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At the risk of being sacrilegious, I’d personally re-order that entry in the knowledge guide:

  1. Do your reviews.
  2. Do them every day, without fail. Probably even on Christmas.
  3. Consider doing at least a few of your available lessons. Maybe even all of them on when you can, but not too many at once or you’ll pay for it over coming weeks and months.

Amen!! I live by this wording. :slight_smile:

However: Note that if, like me, you only do reviews once per day (not multiple times per day) you’ll miss the 4 and 8-hour schedules.*

I used to think this only mattered if you wanted to go as fast as possible (absolutely NOT my personal goal). But it also directly impacts your cognitive load and SRS efficiency.

Basically, the job of an SRS is to give you frequent, repeated reviews of hard stuff, and less frequent reviews for things you find easy. Normally, new stuff in the earliest stages is always hard: it takes several repeats before it “sticks”. Without those 4-hour and 8-hour reviews, you’re making your daily reviews harder.

This is getting off topic, but I think the key to keeping Wanikani from becoming overwhelming boils down to just a few things:

  1. Try to keep the SRS stage distribution of upcoming assignments fairly balanced. Especially avoid too many early-stage items (“Apprentice” and “Guru” items, or stages 1-6). A common heuristic is to keep Apprentice + Guru/10 under about 150 or so. [Self-promotion: my GanbarOmeter userscript makes this especially easy to manage.]

  2. Also try to keep the timing distribution (scheduling) of upcoming assignments balanced. It’s far better to have 100 reviews scheduled each day for a week than 700 scheduled on the same day. This is where the accelerator analogy comes in: doing lessons (or a backlog of missed reviews) in a few huge batches rather than spreading them out is invariably a bad idea. Slow and steady is the ticket to keeping the stress within reason. [The ultimate timeline userscript configured to show the next 120 days of assignments by SRS stage can help you visualize how well you’ve spread out your upcoming assignments.]

  3. Review “new” items (items in stages 1 and 2) repeatedly and frequently, every chance you get. I find it extremely beneficial to get “extra” reviews in for stuff in the first two stages, outside of the Wanikani schedules (mainly because I don’t do multiple review sessions per day). [Again, the GanbarOmeter makes this trivial by launching a self-study quiz for just these items.]

  4. Try not to worry too much about your current level, level-up time, when you’ll “finish,” leeches, or especially wrong answers! The only way the WK SRS knows if you find something difficult is if you answer incorrectly. Anyone beyond level 3 is literally paying for a service to quiz you more often on stuff you find hard to remember: answering incorrectly is how you take advantage of that service.

  5. That said, sometimes you’ll realize that you keep seeing an item as it keeps bouncing back down from higher levels. You’ll occasionally need to figure out why this keeps happening. For me, most often it just means I need more repetitions (i.e. “don’t worry about leeches and let the SRS do its magic”). Other times I’m confusing it with another character and I need to figure out which character that is and figure out some trick to keep them straight.

I think #4 is particularly important. It’s human nature to want to answer everything correctly and progress quickly, but it’s honestly better to relax about incorrect answers: they’re actually the most important part of the process!


* It takes 4 hours from completing a lesson before it’s scheduled in stage 1. It takes another 4 hours and a correct answer to move it to stage 2, and yet another correct answer and 8 hours to move it to stage 3. That’s a minimum of sixteen hours to move an unlocked item to stage 3.

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Personally, I always do all my lessons at once. It seems to work for me! I guess my memory is better than I give it credit for.

Hopefully it’s because memory is better than most. I’ll be curious to hear back as you progress, though.

I know I’m most comfortable with fewer than 200 reviews scheduled per day.

I’m only on level 18, almost 19, so maybe I haven’t got to all the hard ones yet, but I never considered that doing fewer lessons would be beneficial. It’s partly because I hate outstanding things. I always clear all my phone notifications because their presence bugs me. Same with the lessons. If they are there, I will do them.

I have, at most, 225 reviews a day so far, but I will try to do them a couple of times a day so I haven’t had to do that many at once yet.

I have noticed that doing even 150 in one go takes me a lot less time than it used to, which is encouraging to me.

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Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound disparaging. Nor did I mean that the characters get more difficult as you progress. Obviously you’ve progressed more than far enough to fully understand the process (quite quickly, to boot).

I only meant that I hope you’re able to burn items fast enough to continue doing your lessons at full speed (I’m definitely not able to). The workload is cumulative and enlightened items that you haven’t seen in four months can really come back to bite you. Trust me.

I only meant that I’ll be curious if, after a few months, you’re still able and wanting to do all your lessons as soon as they’re available.

“I made it!” posts by more than a few level-60’s prove that many people are able to maintain the pace and finish all 60 levels in a year or so, but I know for certain that I’d have burned out if I tried (and I started this process with a larger spoken Japanese vocabulary than most).

For what it’s worth, it was right around level 17 when I started finding the process a little more difficult and started to value slowing down:

I know I’ve learned a few things since I started seeing those >2 week levels. I’ve only recently learned the value of extra reviews for ANYTHING in stages 1 and 2, for example.

I’m confident that I’ve finally worked out a pace and process that works well for me. I know I’d like to have understood these things a year or so ago when I was around your level.

Here’s what I see every morning with my morning coffee before I start my daily reviews:

I can see at a glance that my assignment queue is healthy (basically Apprentice + Guru/10 is around 150), and that my expected number of daily reviews (the gold dashed line) is within my desired range of 120 to 180.

The review timeline shows that my scheduled reviews are fairly evenly spread out, without any particularly painful days coming up. (Note Feb 12 and 13, though: I can tell I slacked off one day a couple months ago — it would be better if the reviews were balanced between those two days instead of mostly on the 13th.)

Finally, I can see that I’ve burned 4000 of the roughly 9000 items on Wanikani. To my way of thinking, that’s a far better indicator of my “real” progress than my level. I can also see that I’m currently working on a little less than half of the remaining items (roughly 2500 items are “in progress” with scheduled reviews).

Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. Everyone’s experience here will differ. But I still think caution is warranted regarding doing all your lessons as soon as they are available.

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How long have you been doing WK? I’m pretty much seconding Rrwrex’s advice on this. If you haven’t been at this long enough for your enlightened reviews to start coming back (about 6 months in), you haven’t seen your full workload yet.

The best way I can think of to illustrate it is with this graph of my own workload:

The beginning was when I was doing WK very inconsistently, learning all of my available lessons at once, then sometimes forgetting to check my reviews for multiple days. Things stabilized around level 6 when I started to keep a much stricter, more consistent schedule of doing 10-13 lessons a day, with at least three review sessions.

Each color represents a different batch of lessons, with the exception of the first two apprentice levels (I do two batches of reviews for those items in one day, since the reviews are due 4 hours after lessons, and then 8 hours after that).

On any given day, I have reviews coming back twice from my lessons that morning (apprentice stage 1 and 2), as well as reviews from my lessons the day before (apprentice 3), from two days before (apprentice 4), from a week ago (guru 1), from two weeks ago (guru 2), from one month ago (master), and finally from four months ago (enlightened).

Because I do the same amount of lessons each day, the reviews coming in from each stage are really consistent, so the amount of time I spend daily on WK doesn’t really change (it has gradually increased over time as I have more items in circulation/pick up more leeches, but other than small ups and downs, it’s pretty much the same day after day). This makes it nice and easy for me to get my work done, because I know exactly how much time/energy to budget for it. Even when I’m having a terrible day or are super busy, I can still take the time to get my daily SRS time in.

If you don’t do a consistent number of lessons each day, your number of daily reviews probably fluctuates a lot. As you get further in WK, all of your past studying choices will come back to haunt you. So if you binged 40 lessons in one go six months ago because you were feeling great that day, those 40 reviews might come back on top of a couple hundred other reviews during a really bad day for you when you’re feeling sick or extremely demotivated and don’t want to do a bunch of extra work. Some people are able to tough it out, but for others, it can be really hard and lead to burning out.

I recommend pacing yourself with lessons to just about anyone (including OP, once you’ve gotten your reviews back to a more manageable level). Even if you’re trying to level up as fast as possible, you can still spread out your lessons (though I would recommend against going full speed). The ultimate guide to WK talks about scheduling and pacing yourself, and I highly recommend reading through it, because it has a lot of very sound advice about creating a sustainable study schedule with WK.

I’ve been hanging around the forum for almost a year now, and just in that time, I’ve seen quite a few people burn out and quit, and most of the folks who have stuck with it spread out their lessons. I’ve also met a few folks who did all of their lessons as soon as they could and still managed to reach level 60, but most of them ended up with incredibly irregular study schedules where they’d have occasional 400 review days. That’s more than twice as many as the highest number of reviews I’ve ever done in one day. That kind of schedule would not be doable for me.

Apologies for the long explanation, but this is why doing fewer lessons is beneficial! It lets you control your pace and makes things a little smoother overall. My main philosophy with SRS is I want to be kind to my future self, so I make sure my daily workload is easy enough that I can still complete it on a bad day. That’s how I protect myself from burning out.

And @izildop, I think it would be a great idea to pick up WK again and reset back a bunch of levels! You’ve probably lost anything guru or below, as well as probably many master level items, so it might be a good idea to reset back to a level where you have almost all enlightened stage items. If you have vocab lessons you haven’t done, I would reset back to a level where you’ve at least completed all of the lessons. Working through a review backlog can be pretty tough, but there are people on the forum who have done so successfully who can offer advice if you feel like you can’t get through it.

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Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I did not think you were disparaging.

I wasn’t actually planning to rush through the levels. I guess it’s more like, I didn’t employ a particular strategy and just went with the flow, which so far, has worked for me.

I have a few reasons for learning Japanese, but one of them is definitely reading a specific light novel. Knowing that this was my aim, I have been consistently doing my reviews as well as practicing reading other media to slowly put what I have learned into practice. Grammar lessons too, though that takes a back seat when I run out of time.

I will take your advice and slow down if I start struggling, though I see no harm in using a sort of elimination strategy; I do my lessons, then over the next day or so when they come up for review, I pass the ones I remembered and take note of the ones I didn’t. Go over them again or come up with a way to remember them, pass them next time. Any that come up again that I definitely forgot (and there haven’t been that many of those), I create a flashcard for myself and keep them handy to try to commit them to memory. I find that it usually only takes me a couple of tries before it “sticks”.

I am aware it’s not a competition and despite my method, I am not actually trying to rush through it. But it’s good to know that it’s perfectly okay and even encouraged to slow down when needed and I will keep that in mind when I hit a roadblock. :slight_smile:

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Thanks! I replied to the other comment more or less what I would have replied to you so I won’t repeat myself here, but I appreciate your feedback.

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I think everything that would help you get moving forward again – would be a good idea.
If you can dig through the review pile without reset – great
If you can’t – then resetting some levels might be a good idea.

In any case, congratulations on successfully reigniting your motivation and welcome back!
Best of luck with your studies!

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