Hello everyone,
I started using WK around four years ago and I’ve always aimed to clear my reviews to zero each day. In the early levels, this took around 30 minutes, but over time it gradually escalated reaching around six hours daily. This eventually began to interfere with my work because dedicating such a large portion of my day to reviews made it difficult to stay productive and, ultimately, it lead me (not as the main cause, obviously) to lose my job.
After starting a new job, I decided to limit my WK time to two hours a day, outside my 9-to-6 work schedule. It goes without saying that this is hasn’t been enough to keep up with all the reviews and they’ve started piling up: I’m currently sitting on more than 1700 reviews and, even after spending an entire weekend bringing them down to zero, they would go back to above 1000 in just a couple of days and above 1700 in a week.
The worst part is that around 1400 of these reviews are still at Apprentice Level. When I make a mistake, the items often reappear days, or even weeks later, because of the sheer number of reviews that makes other appear first. At this point, I don’t think I’m even using the SRS since the reviews return way later than they should be and it’s becoming increasingly hard to recall the items (and frustrating to see number of items in Apprentice Level increase).
So, is there anything I could do to improve my situation, or should I just let it go and spend that time on something else? Ideally, I think a script that limits me to 100 daily reviews focused on my “lowest level” items first would help, but I’m not sure if such a script exists or if it may mess up with the SRS too because I’ll be neglecting many other items.
Thanks in advance to whever will give me an advice!
I would start with a long hard look at wkstats.com. You have more than 6000 burns and almost 1500 apprentice. Are the apprentice items from the last 10-15 levels or are they from all levels? If you have many appprentice items from the last 10-15 levels, it might be a good idea to reset down to maybe level 50, get your reviews under control there, and then climb slowly back up to level 60.
Using the Reorder Omega script is also a good idea, and/or use it together with Vacation Mode. If you go to Vacation mode, you will not get any more new reviews. So stay in Vacation mode until you’ready to do reviews, do 50/100/as many as you want number of reviews, and go back into Vacation Mode until you’re ready to do another 50/100 reviews. I think that’s the only realistic way you’ll be able to get to 0 and stay there.
Other than that, as @simias said, you are level 60. How important is it to you to do the rest of the reviews and burn everything? Maybe it would be a better idea to put Wanikani in Vacation Mode, do a few reviews now and then if you want, and other than that spend your time on actually using Japanese. If you spend 1 hour every day on reading rather than reviews, you might pick up more Japanese from that
Ok so, I crunched the numbers from wkstats.com and found that I have around 900 Apprentice items from levels 21-50, plus another 400 from levels 51-60. Resetting to level 50 doesn’t seem like it would make much of a difference and I don’t feel like resetting all the way back to level 20.
I’ve been considering playing with the Vacation Mode and deactivate it, do some reviews and reactivate it before the next hour to keep the number of reviews frozen. I could combine this with the Reorder Omega script to focus on fixing at least the lower-level items.
More importantly, as you mentioned, I might be overly fixated on completing reviews while neglecting other activities like reading. I’ve been putting off reading for years telling myself I need to complete WK first.
Thank your for your advice! I think I’ll cut back on the time I spend on WK, and if I manage to reduce the number of reviews, great, if not, so be it. I feel like I’ve actually gotten everything I can from WK and it’s probably time to move on.
Don’t wait to “complete WK” (By which I assume you mean to Burn more)
Go read now! It’ll help solidify what you’ve learned.
I know my WK level is low but I have prior experience of grade 1-3 (and some across 4-6) and I read. Yeah I look things up sometimes but you’d be surprised how much I can read without looking up while having a solid 600 or so kanji under my belt. With your level, you’re more than ready to get started.
I’d put your account on vacation mode and never come back.
Reading is hard getting into it no matter what. But the longer you put it off, the more time and effort you’re wasting. With apprentice counts like that (and seemingly a lot of items burned you haven’t seen in a while), it seems entirely possible that you’re worse off now than you were a few months ago. If you want to keep improving your Japanese it’s time to move forward. With time dedication like that you could/can make serious progress
