i don’t know what to do at this point. i know repetition is necessary for learning kanji and vocab, but man, the review process makes me viscerally angry. getting items wrong over and over again feels like a punishing chore and i don’t want to do it anymore. it’s at the point where nothing is sticking because i’m long past the frustration threshold. i put it on vacation mode for now, but the last time i did this, by the time i was ready to come back, i’d forgotten a lot and i ended up right back in the spiral of reviews piling up due to mistakes.
i like wanikani’s structured approach to kanji. learning radicals, then kanji, then vocab is helpful, and i like that it creates a foundation and builds on top of it. but learning words in isolation is absolutely useless. i can’t count the number of times i’ve forgotten a word in wanikani, then recognized it while reading, then forgot it again next time i saw it in wani. i don’t think SRS works for me, but i also don’t know if just reading native material will be sufficient for learning new words.
i’m just at a loss. i don’t want to quit the language. i’ve been at it for a while now and i’m too invested to stop entirely. i was just hoping for some thoughts on what to do from here. i’m 100% done with SRS. taking a break and coming back isn’t an option. the frustration i feel during the review process isn’t worth it. i don’t think it’s a learning method that works for me. i just don’t know what else to do, because everywhere you go online, it’s “use anki or wanikani” and it’s like it’s the only option, even though i know it isn’t because humans have been learning language for thousands of years without it. most people won’t even entertain the idea of learning a language without it.
Ok then? Some of us like it some don’t do want us to do about it?
i know i wrote a lot but it’s like you didn’t read past the first part
Hey man, if it’s making you feel like this it’s not worth doing. Put your Wanikani on vacation mode and try engaging with native material for a while! Even if learning words as you come across them is technically slower than SRS, if it’s more enjoyable it’s worth it.
Hey,
If you can already have some reading practice you can drop / pause WK and work only with content you really want to get to.
What’s your objective ?
Maybe we can help steer you in a direction that matches with what you like.
Since you are struggling with too many items in low apprentice levels (which are the bulk of reviews piling up), maybe you could try resetting back a couple of levels.
This will at least remove the reviews of all those items completely so you can try studying them fresh from the start, and you could try at a slower pace so you can focus on say, three items at a time until you have those learned, then other three and so on.
Doing too many lessons at once can definitely lead to SRS becoming overwhelming because you get stuck in exactly that loop of “can’t learn anything because of too many reviews, too many reviews because nothing is sticking and moving in the actual more spaced intervals”
eventually? reading native material (manga/novels/games/etc), listening to japanese streamers and being able to understand them (such as hololive). i’ve never been big on anime, but there are a few i’d like to be able to watch in japanese eventually. it isn’t an option now, but visiting japan and actually being able to speak to people would be a long term goal. i’ve been playing through the super mario rpg remake on switch in japanese and it’s going… decently. i don’t understand EVERYTHING, but i seem to understand enough to know what’s happening in the story and how to move forward in a game ive never played before.
it has been noticeably rougher since level 10. that’s when my accuracy started to tank. i don’t know what it was about that level, but it’s when i noticed things not sticking anywhere near as much as they were in previous levels. and it’s kind of been spiraling ever since.
Ultimately, you either have to figure out why you’re frustrated by it and see if you can change your attitude in a way that you don’t find it frustrating, or… yeah, do without SRS and go find a different way to learn.
The first one is mostly going to be a personal thing - only you really know why you find it so frustrating, but perhaps you’re expecting faster progress than what you’re seeing, or perhaps you’re focusing too much on the short-term failures and not the long-term growth. Because, yeah, it’s completely normal to forget the same word over-and-over (I think this is true regardless of how you study, but certainly it’s true of SRS), but it does stick eventually.
Or yeah, you can do without SRS - as you say, people have been learning languages for a long time before “Spaced Repetition Systems” were developed. … though it did often involve fairly similar techniques: flashcards have been a staple of language learning for a long time, and SRS is really just a refinement on the timing.
I do think it’s hard to study a language without some level of rote-memorization up front: sure you want to learn from just exposure to native material eventually, but it’s very hard to do that without some basics to build on.
If you want a specific plan for try to learn without SRS or SRS-style systems, your best bet is probably some sort of Graded Reader approach where you find very basic reading material and slowly work your way up to more advanced stuff. I think that can work, though I always found it hard to find a good variety of basic stuff, and personally I found reading stuff roughly equivalent to “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” over-and-over significantly more annoying than SRS when I attempted it.
yeah it’s been put in vacation mode. like, i don’t WANT to quit. it’s been invaluable in learning what i have up to this point. but it’s been like 4 fairly frustrating levels in succession and i’m wondering if it’s going to continue in this direction.
I’m curious to know how some of your numbers… How many reviews per batch? How often are you doing reviews? How many new lessons are you doing per day, and at what point do you decide not to take on new lessons.
It’s difficult for me to say without knowing the situation, but this is the exact state/cycle I was stuck in a few months ago. I took on grammar in Bunpro, which was very challenging for me, and it didn’t take very long at all to learn that I was taking on too much, too fast, with little regard to my current progress. I learned that when I hit that frustration step, I needed to review more frequently, in smaller batches, and forego new lessons if what I had in my review pile wasn’t sticking
Hey there,
There is definitely a preference for SRS in online learning communities, but it is far from the only way to learn! Traditional textbooks, classroom work, online tutors, immersion, good old writing vocab in a notebook.
Maybe look around and get some ideas for other methods people have had success with and give those a shot.
Rooting for you!
i originally was taking on a LOT every level (like upwards of 20 a day), because i reset to level 1 after my long break so there were several levels that were already fairly memorized. but i stopped doing that around level 10, because that’s when i noticed things were becoming troublesome and i was ending up with well over a hundred reviews every day. i’ve been taking 10 new items a day at most since level 10, but for a few days now i haven’t taken any, and that feels bad in its own way.
There’s many days where I don’t do any lessons at all because it would give me too many reviews in the next couple of days, so there’s no need to worry about that because it’s perfectly normal!
Personally, I set a number of maximum apprentice level items and don’t do any lessons if it would make them go over that number. It could be 100, for some levels where I was busier it was 70 or 80.
That made me go a bit slower any slow progress is better than stopping completely!
If it helps, I also definitely remember hitting a bit of a wall at level 13 or so? Maybe there were just a lot of similar kanji I kept getting confused.
I would say, if you want to try to keep using SRS, to try and reset to around level 10.
Yes, you lose some progress, but at least you remove the mountain of reviews and can focus on doing lessons slower and figuring out exactly which items are giving you trouble and why
That sounds to me like a good initial reaction. What is your total number of reviews per day that you’ve been doing, and how often are you working them? One of the things that I struggled with a LOT when I was forgetting things frequently was not getting timing down on the first couple passes for new items. I wasn’t making much time in the day to come back and work on reviews, so I would have a HUGE lump in the morning and another in the evening, and quite often those were the only two times a day that I was doing reviews.
I found it extremely helpful to do two things:
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Limit batch size to no more than 30-40. If I have more than that in a big lump, I’ll split it in two. Work some, get distracted and do something else for a bit, then finish up the rest.
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On items that you’re struggling with, you’ll see them more often, but if you wait too long, you’re more likely to forget them again, so make time for them as you’re able. Even if you’re doing tiny little 5 item review batches. WK tries to put items in front of you right before you’re likely to forget them, and everyone’s different, but if you stretch that too long, then you are increasingly likely to forget them anyway.
On top of those two things, I’ve also found that in general, when I get frustrated during reviews, I’m even more likely to make mistakes. It’ll build up and feedback loop before you know it. Take a break, cool off, and come back again.
thanks, i’ll take a possible reset into consideration. as i said, i don’t WANT to stop and if i can find a way to make it work, i’d prefer that. i also feel bad for my incredibly angry tone in my initial post. i was just really frustrated so i think part of it was venting.
I’ll also add – when I was struggling, I was having trouble with less than 100 review items per day. Once I noticed that, I made a more conscious effort to manage that count, and became very deliberate with managing review count. I’ll look ahead to tomorrow sometimes, if I feel like I’m doing too much, and not take on lessons in order to keep that limited.
Now that I’ve built a stronger routine, I’m doing closer to 150-200 reviews per day, but there’s no way I could have maintained those numbers a month or so ago. It’s only because of a more deliberate routine that I’ve been able to ramp it up higher.
Here’s my heat map for this year so far:
My general advice would be to practice towards what you want to do and to find the appropriate tooling to do so.
We have an enormous bonus of stamina when deciphering content about the things we truly care about.
If you’re playing a game for example does the lack of understanding bothers you ?
Since you’ve mentioned
How do you handle the unknowns ?
If they don’t bother you great ! Keep playing!
If they do enough to make you pause and want to go though that specific bit of content what is your strategy ?
Having a process in place to handle those situations and integrating those in your learning routine can help you with sustained practice that feel more like entertainment than practice. If something in your practice feel off drop it or change it.
my advice? start doing this today. it will be a slog and it might kinda suck, but there’s going to be a degree of that no matter what amount of preparation you have, just because it will always be at least a little bit of a new and initially difficult activity.
if there’s something you’re dying to be able to read or listen to comfortably, maybe you’ll be able to tolerate the discomfort of consuming it at your current level enough to do it again and again, which will build your level and your comfort zone?
i look up words i don’t know on the jisho website, especially if i see them multiple times, since that means they’re probably important for the story. my grammar is decent enough that usually it’s vocab preventing me from understanding, not sentence structure. sometimes i just accept that i don’t know what a sentence is saying and move on. it bothered me at first, to the point where i was attempting to translate everything even if it meant plugging it into DeepL or Google. but i mostly stopped doing that. the biggest trip ups are words that are written only in kana, or kana-only set expressions. things like なるほど that don’t really have a definition but are instead just little bits that people say in conversation.
