So recently I’ve started practicing reading every day, and I’ve come across a new problem.
I frequently am seeing my enlightened items during reading practice, a few days before they come up for burning.
But I’ve noticed that even though I didn’t remember the meaning or the reading while reading, and I had to look it up, I DO remember it 2-4 days later when the wanikani srs review comes up.
Then I burn an item that I saw three days ago, instead of 4 months ago.
Am I robbing myself? If I notice these cases, should I reset the item? Miss them on purpose? Burn and forget?
What are other readers doing to tackle this problem. Thank you in advance for any advice
For me, if I remember seeing it and looking its meaning/reading up, that means that I didn’t originally remember the meaning of the word. If I hadn’t encountered it during reading, then I would not remember the word when WaniKani showed it. Therefore I intentionally miss the question if I don’t remember it in either WaniKani or seeing it “in the wild”
I get the idea that it feels like you’re missing progress or getting a false positive, but I wouldn’t worry about that. If you’re reading enough to be encountering these words in books regularly, then you’re probably going to remember them more by reading in context than you would through the srs itself. With enough reading material, reading itself reinforces common words more often than the srs windows would. So a large amount of reading can be supplemental to or even replace your srs routine. You could intentionally fail those items if you want to be stricter about whether you would have really remembered it by only doing WaniKani, but part of the idea of WaniKani is that you read alongside it in the middle and later levels. Don’t be afraid of reading messing up the progression of srs because the reading is going to be more authentic material than the srs. WaniKani stops at level 60 but books and newspapers keep being written all the time.
Memory in these stages is volatile; you could catch the same word on the right or wrong day and get different results, and nothing you learn through Wanikani alone without outside reinforcement is really aiming to realistically be permanently locked in knowledge. Reading is the best thing you can do and where the real learning in context happens; WK is just basic scaffolding to make that reading less painful. I highly recommend not worrying at all about this, passing anything on WK if you know it at the time, and keeping up the reading.
A lot of early Kanji and Vocab, I could (if it was possible) set to Burned immediately.
A lot of unfamiliar, slightly more advanced Kanji or Vocab have taken a few fails to get to Wanikani: Burned status. And I also have quite a few leeches.
For me, Wanikani provides a system to get SRS exposure to Kanji with supporting Vocab.
A lot of the Burned stuff will become hazy if I don’t see or use it in the next year or two.
Wanikani is a great tool to help me slowly extend the limits of my Japanese reading. It has gotten much more difficult at higher levels: basically these days 95 to 100% of the Kanji and Vocab are new to me. That’s all okay: just press on, and try to read more; don’t expect perfection. And trust the system.
The thing with vocab and Kanji in actual reading (or listening) is, it depends on the reading material. Knowing too few vocab would limit the number of materials you can comfortably read. You could tend to avoid reading some things.
I think you shouldn’t feel ill using a dictionary too often. Forgetting reading and meaning or both may happen from time to time, even for burnt items.
Or, if possible, split the mindset between materials you look up lot, and materials you look up very little.
Regarding SRS, I would indeed try to remember everything well, including no typo and avoid hidden synonyms.
