SRS doesn't distinguish between meaning and reading

You really don’t need wanikani quizzing you on 人 when you read that kanji every day and know it like the back of your hand. Nobody needs infinite SRS for remembering words in their native language, so why should you need it for a second language? It’s just a tool to help you remember a lot of words quickly, you’ll only remember them permanently if you use them.

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Indeed. SRS flashcards are training wheels to help you get to the point where you don’t use them anymore. The goal isn’t to use training wheels for the rest of your life.

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Yeah, if it wasn’t so painful to read without a good foundation in kanji, there wouldn’t even really be a need for something like WaniKani. Once you have that foundation, there certainly isn’t a need for it.

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I don’t have much to say on the main topic, aside from that I automatically think of both the reading and(more implicitly) the meaning when I see a word so it’d feel very weird to have them split up.

But unrelated to that I can second what everyone else is saying about burning items: It might seem like a good idea to keep reviewing the items forever at level 1(I thought so too), but by when you’ve gotten to a higher level and started reading stuff it’s pretty likely you’ll be happy you don’t have to waste time reviewing things over and over and over for very little gain :slight_smile: It’s hard to realise just how much work that would actually be when you’re just getting started and also how little you would actually gain from it(or at least that’s my experience. The amount of words I’ve had to look up that I’ve forgotten after burning them is very low, and most of the time just seeing the word in context is enough that I don’t have to unburn it afterwards).

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Ok, you got me, maybe this part could also be automated: browser plugin that checks what I read online and videoplayer plugin that reads subtitles of what I watch and uses API to unburn the items it suspects I haven’t seen in a while :))

How about you write those plugins then? :stuck_out_tongue: But that sounds crazy complicated ngl. How would a plug-in know if you actually read the kanji vs. the kanji just being on the webpage? How would it know if you were actually reading the subtitles or just listening? Sounds way easier to just unburn something when you realize you’ve forgotten it. Honestly I think you should give this idea a rest till you reach a level where you’ve burnt items, and then reconsider how often you want them coming back.

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Welcome to the forums! :slight_smile:

The latest generation of language learners seem to have an obsession / fascination with overly optimizing SRS systems. Please, just go use the Japanese once you learn it. That’s the entire reason you’re learning Kanji, right? Reviewing items on WK reinforces things at a lower Depth of Knowledge (DoK 1) than you’d develop by going and speaking, listening, reading, and writing in Japanese (DoK 2 - 4). WaniKani is just a tool to help bootstrap your Japanese reading ability. You’re actually doing yourself a disservice by continuing to use the tool beyond its designated purpose.

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I kinda get the pain, when you’re sitting with >1000 reviews to do, you don’t want to waste time on things you know. If 500 are readings you don’t want to prioritise, taking 7.2 seconds each, thats an hour of your life, when you want to get to the things you want to learn (yes, I back tracked time to get to 1 hour)

The main pain is that unless you complete all 1000 reviews at that time, you’ll find some things you half reviewed will be still be there next time, so you have to review that [meaning / reading] again.
And as I always seem to have review spare, there’s always wasted time spent on either the meaning or reading. (This is WK round 2 for me, I don’t have any reviews to do at level 7 right now)

It wouldn’t be as bad if you could opt to exclude certain meanings / spellings you don’t need, or even if you could press a button to shove them to the back of the review pile.

But this will always be 10 items or less. There are never more than 10 active items, no matter how big your queue is. That’s how the wrap up button works. After you push it, those ten items get completed and your session ends.

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… there’s a wrap up button? … this is going to make life easier

Yes, it’s the left most button under the input line. Unless you use an app, then I’m not sure, but Flaming Durtles allows you to set batch size before you start the review.

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thanks, flaming durtles sounds like the thing for me

We need some kind of AI. Hooked up to a webcam with eye tracking.

I feel like there should be a third sentence with a punchline in it here, but I don’t have it in me right now

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I was the punchline :disappointed:

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Maybe you should try the wanikani anki deck since that probably can solve some of your issues. Anki doesn’t have a burn stage meaning your reviews keep going forever. The max interval is I think 10 years. The wanikani decks I’ve tried had the meaning and reading cards separate so that if you keep failing the reading card, it won’t affect the meaning card, vice versa. However, anki doesn’t have any lock system like wanikani so you have to suspend all the cards and unlock them yourself. Maybe there’s an add-on that can do something similar but I don’t know. Also, anki is a bit confusing at first and if you want wanikani’s intervals, you have to set it up yourself.

\textcolor{pink}{\huge \textsf{WELCOME! ^-^}}
@Cookiy

welcome gif - crabigator

Take the time to check out the FAQ and GUIDE if you haven’t already.

There’s also a lot of good stuff on the forum to help you, like:

The Ultimate Guide for WK
The Ultimate Additional Japanese Resources List!
The New And Improved List Of API and Third Party Apps

I hope your Japanese learning journey goes well and that you enjoy your time with us on the forums.

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I’d recommend kitsun.io over Anki, on account of them already having wanikani levels attached to WK items, so you can filter. ^-^
Which I only realised after using it for a couple of days, haha

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There’s a userscript for reviewing burned items, Burn Reviews, that adds a panel on the Dashboard to periodically quiz you on items you have burned and lets you unburn any you get wrong. However, I do agree with the others that reading means you encounter those items out in the wild frequently enough to not forget them. If you do forget some obscure kanji because you never encounter it, well, no huge loss.

The point of WK is not to constantly test your kanji knowledge, it’s to teach you the kanji well enough to read Japanese material. Once you have burned an item, in theory you know it well enough that you will recognize it if you run across it.

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Haha I’m the opposite I always get the meanings wrong but the readings correct.

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