It sounds like you might be going too fast. Learning a language is a journey. Take a break from WaniKani, put it on Vacation mode, or do a few reviews a day. Doing too many lessons or reviews every day can become mentally exhausting.
I personally took long breaks. - Level 37, I was going too fast, which eventually led to around 1,000 reviews. I made more mistakes, which created even more reviews.
Taking a vacation/break helped me.Touching grass lol you name it, anything that relaxes you
You can also learn from other resources while keeping your WaniKani workload manageable. Most importantly, don’t rush.
14 levels in 4 years means it would take one 16~18 years just to complete wanikani (not to mention other stuff you need to study like grammar, etc.) . i think most people would prefer finishing learning the core fundamentals while they’re still alive - or at least young enough to use it in practice.
of course it’s a completely subjective thing - but at that rate you’re spending 2 days on EACH one of the 9,226 total items on WK. i think that’s a bit extreme.
i personally think a more realistic pace one could strive for is finishing WK in 3~4 years instead of within 1. that by itself is a much more leisurely pace.
you just need to be in a state of mind where a “mistake” is not actually a “mistake” - it’s simply an indication that you don’t yet know this symbol/word well enough yet.
I think this might be the main issue for the problem outlined in the initial post and is worth emphasizing. If SRS doesn’t work as well for you as other methods, that’s fine, it’s not a mandatory tool for learning Japanese. But if doing SRS makes you “viscerally angry”, then I think you should question whether it’s possible for you to let go of this severe emotional response to mistakes instead dropping SRS altogether.
One thing that makes people angry is feeling powerless. If you believe that you must do X new lessons every day and that your review accuracy must always be Y%, but the review performance simply doesn’t allow that, it is easy to get angry. In that case, I’d even say you are perfectly right to be angry at the SRS because it is disempowering you from reaching your goal.
But if your goal is to learn read Kanji, however long that might take, then the SRS mistakes are empowering you. Now the system knows which items to show you more often to help you learn them properly. And a dropping review score gives you important information on whether you should slow down on doing new lessons, or even stop new lessons completely for a while (which is totally fine and sometimes the most efficient decision for long-term progress). We should feel thankful for these things rather than angry.
Sorry for all the armchair psychology. But I really believe this type of framing is immensely helpful in making SRS pleasant and sticking with it long-term. And again, if you still come to the conclusion that SRS is not an effective tool for you, that’s also a valid option.
Level 13 here, and I’ve used vacation mode a couple of times with the same result that you had. I forgot too much and it took a long time to get back into it.
Recently, level 12 was giving me trouble, but what helped me was to change my settings so that I was getting no new words at all. I just did reviews of kanji I had already learned for about 3 months. I needed the review time without new stuff constantly being added. But I’m also not in a rush – I’m in my 60s and just want to learn because my daughter-in-law is Japanese.
I don’t know what your goal is, but maybe slowing down and just reviewing things you’ve already been given would help you too.
thanks for the replies, everyone. i got distracted yesterday and didn’t check the thread again until this morning. i thought about it and decided to continue with WK, but at a slower pace for a while. i also installed the Anki mode script to turn them into actual flash cards – i know typing them manually increases retention, but getting through reviews a little quicker seems to help. also, for whatever reason, deciding the answer is wrong myself feels not as bad as the site telling me i’m wrong. i have no idea why that is. but it reduces those negative emotions i was experiencing.
I feel a lot better by doing less lessons. I was doing 25 then it ballooned into 400 daily reviews. Then I moved to 15 and it went to 300-380 because I had a memory failure.
Now 10 lessons and its 240 daily reviews and decreasing which is way better. Extra time for reading or just normal everyday life activities.
Turns out I don’t care about my projected completion date of Jan 1st. I’d rather read more and do other stuff. So it got pushed back to like March-ish? or whatever. Who knows? ??? It doesn’t matter. It’ll get done when it gets there.
I think that’s the right call. It sounds like a lot of the frustration stemmed from density and pacing, so going slow and/or getting through things faster will probably help with that quite a lot.
Happy to hear you’re going to stick with it, but definitely go at a pace that feels comfortable and not frustrating. Whatever it takes to maintain a comfortable pace, while still maintaining even a tiny bit of learning, is probably the right call, even if it means slowing way down.
Like so many things in life, focusing on speed is usually not sustainable long term. Focus on just doing what you can. As you get more comfortable, you’ll probably get faster and more accurate. But for now, just work on doing something you’ll stick with first and foremost.
As a side note, how long did it take to balloon to 400 daily when you went up to 25 lessons a day? I just increased from 21 to 25 because I was feeling comfortable with the speed, but if it’s going to put me at 400 reviews a day, I may have to rethink that!
Hi, I read your post and want to say not to take WaniKanni and the SRS too seriously. It is after all a computer that does not care if you get a word right or wrong.
I love it when I do remember a Kanji that I leaned on WaniKani and then I see it in Duolingo or a door knob for ‘pull’ or what ever. It makes me feel great. I know it works. The words I do learn make well worth it for me.
There any many words I can’t remember. The spellings/reading are very similar. Its nuts. Many Kanji are the opposite of what would be easy for eg : ‘left’. All the special cases and irregular ones I am not remembering that a week later even if I guessed it today. No way.
If I don’t know a word I look it up on Jisho or the internet. I also write them all down once and use my notes first few times. Now you can also right click and send it straight to AI for a quick reminder lesson. AI is actually a better lesson. I don’t have all day for Wanni Kani. I have a full time job and lots else to do. I like to have zero reviews before bed. Inside or outside the learning zone it don’t matter once I am asleep.
The kanji I do know I use them when I write to my Japanese teacher once per week. They pop right up when I type the reading in Outlook. I recognize them quick because I typed them in Wanikani 100 times. I rock at the homework and I am just 1 year in.
So in short the point is of WaniKani is the ones you do remember. The ones you forget just look them up and move on quick.
Ok, that’s good to know. I’ll make sure and keep a close on on the upcoming review count.. Thanks for mentioning that, you may well have saved me from a second burnout, depending on how well I do at paying attention!
i think accuracy is (or can be) definitely a contributing factor as well? i’m probably at or near what will be the peak in terms of total daily reviews and i don’t recall ever doing 400 in a day.
i say i’m at the peak since 1) i’m in the fast levels, 2) i’ve been going long enough that i have cards coming up for reviews from “apprentice” through “burned” and 3) i’m going more or less as fast as i can (generally i do every lesson within 24 hours of it unlocking, so some days i’ve probably done close to 100). judging from my WK calendar widget, i’ve never done more than 350 reviews in a day this month, and judging from my review forecast, the days that i get above 300 are entirely due to doing multiple apprentice reviews in a day.
I know you have already decided on an opinion but you can also try something new like Migaku, it’s an integrated SRS system that is really cool in my opinion. Has something for everyone and you can import your WaniKani knowledge into it, I recommend looking into atleast with some YouTube videos because you don’t wanna lose out on a possible win
Wow! There are a lot of replies in this thread! I’ll just add one more idea, and that is to always pass every review. Always mark it correct. Of course some of these you’ll forget or didn’t deserve to pass, but most of them will be fine and the ones you didn’t remember very well will still be a little bit in your brain and will give you an advantage when you encounter them later in real life. So you still get the benefit of the SRS reviews mostly, but you can approach your reviews quickly and with zero stress. Then spend the rest of your time immersing in native content, audio, video, reading, etc.
I know the thread has been marked as solved but wanted to share my thoughts on the topic, since I had the same experience at the exact same lvl 14.
I worked pretty much on WK and Bunpro every day for 9 months, but couldn’t keep up with the pace. I took a 2 week vacation in the beginning of June (almost burnt out of Japanese and SRS basically) and forgot to put on vacation mode (ups) and ended up with 500+ reviews. I tried to catch up for a month but only managed to lower the pile around 300 because of the huge amount of mistakes I was making because I forgot almost everything from the last levels. I was getting suuuper frustrated and about to make a post with almost the same title and then saw this thread haha.
The measure I took is that I got back to lvl 10, where I had the feeling I have a good grasp on the material. This set the pile of reviews at about 200+ reviews that I slayed today, with 80% accuracy (I was as low as 60% when trying catching up my reviews). I feel more confident than ever and ready to climb the Craigbaitor Ladder again ! >:o
Honestly, this seems to be an issue of your active skill (referring to what you actually use/ truly know) not catching up to your vocab study. Meaning, you’re pushing yourself to do vocab study when right now you should probably be focusing on listening.
Studying listening/active reading as well as kanji/vocab is important because at some point, if you advance too far in one and not enough in the other, it will hinder you in both. At this point I feel like you should be binging netflix (or whatever streaming service) to make those words actually stick in your brain. Or if you feel your listening is at a level where you can pretty much understand without subtitles, start active reading (as in reading real books/manga/news articles and not just lists of words, and highlighting / taking notes as you go).
I also like to use a notebook for things I’m constantly getting wrong in my reviews, and it tends to help (especially in differentiating similar kanji). You can also try writing kanji out so your brain remembers them more naturally.
I do think you’ve made the right decision in going on vacation mode. Good luck.
lotsa people have replied so I’ll keep my thoughts brief
WK works really well for me compared to Bunpro/anki, but even doing flashcard vocab in bunpro/anki was helping me learn words that I later remembered learning when I came across them in the wild. I’d say stick to some kind of SRS at a snail pace, maybe 5-8 items a day, if you want to make immersion your main choice of learning. also, if you continue with WK, just focus on getting those apprentice numbers down, and dont worry about guru items or new lessons, or anything else until after.