That last bit worries me a little ā you may not fully understand my point. My worry is that waiting until you start to struggle to slow down might prove too late.
My caution about doing lessons isnāt about reviewing items youāve seen recently (within a few days or weeks).
Most of us find our recall drops dramatically for items we havenāt seen for a few months (items that reached master and enlightened stages).
Remember that every completed lesson increases the total number of items you are actively reviewing. The only way to decrease that total is by progressing items to stage 9 (burned).
Items you answer easily and correctly today may prove more difficult after a few months without any reviews (stage-7/master items you answer correctly today wonāt be reviewed again for 120 days exactly).
I see you started in September. That means youāll start seeing and hopefully burning enlightened items soon if you havenāt already. But will the lessons youāre doing today be as easy to burn as items from the first few levels?
I think the majority of WK burnouts had more items under active review than they could actually handle. Unless your burn rate is equal to or larger than your lesson rate, WK gets progressively more difficult.
Iām one of the people who thinks that WK maybe has too much vocab, especially items that are redundant and/or that have weird meanings you canāt easily deduce from the Kanji, which tends to make the items leechy. That said, skipping all the vocab doesnāt make a lot of sense for me because it detracts from the value proposition of WK.
WK intends to teach you Kanji meanings and readings. By only doing Kanji reviews, not only are you being indirectly quizzed less on every Kanji you learn (I feel thatās important because WK review intervals are quite large compared to e.g. Anki) but also youāre skipping at least half of readings (for most items).
If you just want to learn Kanji meanings without readings, I think something like RTK and then learning readings explicitly through vocab that you get from somewhere else (e.g. core anki decks) might be more fit for the purpose.
You make an excellent point. I wasnāt even going fast, but it turned out I was going too fast for me - which I found out when all the things I only half knew came back to bite me about 10 months in. No lessons for me for months while I got my (returned) apprentice items under control. I have done a few lessons recently but Iām going to be a lot stricter about not taking things on unless my apprentice is under 100. Iām not beating myself about getting things wrong, Iām just accepting Iām here for the long haul
I restarted myself recently. I believe I was at level 13 and then I had to take a break because my work became crazy for months and when I came back I couldnāt bring myself to work through the 1200 built up reviews that I probably forgot half of. It was for sure the right call to restart, even though these early levels are agonizingly slow I found I retained a good bit still. Definitely donāt skip the vocab this time, as others have said, itās the actual language part of the language hah. I would also suggest going in with as few scripts as possible, ones that donāt help you cheat yourself. I basically just use the dashboard cockpit and kamesame for cementing in the production of the words and kanji. I wish I had known about kamesame sooner, because it lets you add in things from other sources very easily.
if you feel like you have no quick recall on a lot of kanji then yes. i reset from 40 to 1 and iām super happy. am going slower and always do at least a third of the daily lessons as vocab.
B: It never occurred to me to use the heatmap to look forward like that. Thanks for the hint!
I use the heatmap mostly as a streak-tracker, motivational thing looking backward in time. It shows Iām coming up on 100,000 total reviews which is a pretty cool milestone, and Iām making a good run on finally beating my longest review streak. I did 199 days in a row very early on, then somehow didnāt get another review in until after midnight on the 200th day. It wouldnāt have hurt nearly bad if it was the 237th day or some other ānot roundā number.
For looking forward I like configuring the ultimate timeline to show 120 days out by SRS level (as shown above).
In case anyone not averse to scripts cares: hereās my current dashboard (Iām VERY fond of it):
Thatās the GanbarOmeter script on top, followed by the Ultimate Timeline, then Burn Progress, the stock stuff, then the Heatmap, and the stock SRS distribution (which I can also see from the data view in the GanbarOmeter).
Iām using the Breeze Dark theme to get that low-stress dark background.
Oh, what the heck. For completeness, hereās the bottom half of my dashboard, too:
