Suggested feature: re-review wrong answers

Hi =)
I have a feature I’d like to suggest.

Often when I’m doing reviews I find that, once I’ve gotten through the one’s I know, there’s just a pile of as many as 10 or 15 leeches left to do. I go through them soooo slowly, and I feel like I’m often just guessing at their meaning and reading, and at some point I stop trying to recall. I just let myself get it wrong, check the answer, and try to remember what it is for next time it comes up. The feature I’d like to suggest is that, when you’ve finished your reviews and you get the summary page, I think it would be useful to be able to re-review immediately the ones you got wrong. It would motivate me with my leeches to really try and recall them, and find new ways of remembering them, and I would have a way to check that it worked afterwards and consolidate my knowledge. I don’t imagine it would have any consequence on the outcome of the review session, it would just be a useful tool that you could use if you want to in order to test if you’ve actually learnt anything from your mistakes.

Please consider it!
Thank you for all your hard work, I can’t tell you how grateful I am =D

P.S. I still have an ancient leech in my review queue: 勉 the kanji. When I see it I’m like “I know it. I’m sure I know it.” And yet I keep putting きょう instead of べん and “excuse” instead of “exertion”. I’ve been reviewing it most days for nearly a year now. Why am I like this? O_o
Anyone else have a similar problem haha? XD

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You can use the Self Study and Leech Trainer scripts for this, I think

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Here’s a way of remembering it that might be of some help:

勉強 - べんきょう
The only kanji there which uses the “excuse” radical is 勉。Ben keeps making excuses to not study/because he doesn’t like exerting himself (exertion). So if you see the excuse radical, it’s ben, and that means the other one is kyou! :smiley:

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Can you! I have yet to try out any userscripts since I can’t work out how to use them on an iPad (I haven’t got a computer). I’ll admit I haven’t tried very hard to work it out yet, so I’ll have another go now. Thanks for your help!

Ahh thank you! This might just do the trick :crossed_fingers:t2::smile:

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It sounds like you’re getting the same items wrong multiple times in the same review session - is this the case? If it is, I’d like to warn you that the SRS level of an item goes down on 1st, 3rd, 5th, etc. wrong answers (sum between both reading and meaning). Maybe this is desired behavior for you, but I found it less so and didn’t realize it worked this way for a long time, so thought I should warn you :slight_smile:

Gosh, yes. That would explain why some items that I had gotten quite far on went right back to apprentice after I forgot them haha… it’s probably for the best though; if I forgot them so completely then clearly I need to review them more often! Thanks for the heads up anyway :smile:

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I’ve still got 5 unburned items from level 1 knocking around. It happens. lol

Just do the best you can and move on.

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I support this idea. WK needs a default “leech function” for reviewing some problematic items much more often.

Wanikani is great for items that you studied “right” the first time. It helps them transition from short-term memory to long-term memory.
But imo it doesn’t work well with very confusing stuff (usually the abstract words). Those need more reviews. Getting them up and down on the SRS stairs is not enough.
Even if the mnemonic doesn’t work (and you can’t find one that works) you can solve it with pure memorization (i.e. seeing it so often you simply can’t forget it).
There are 2 solution I can think of:

  1. Using user scripts like Kumirei suggested to review some specific items.
  2. Putting them in another SRS like ANKI where you will have thousands of reviews (adjusting time intervals and/or putting it in many cards)…
  3. if they are vocabulary words (so not your case), adding some sentences to reinforce it (again on ANKI)

It’s more of a palliative, but you could also try:

  1. Checking the wrong answers at the end of the WK review sessions (guess, then hover over the wrong ones to check), and before starting the new review session (same thing, once more). [It’s like reviewing them 3 times more often.]
  2. Giving up on the current mnemonic and spending a lot of time to find a unique one.

True, but looking at all the people with ancient leeches, this seems to me an essential feature. Shouldn’t they implement something like this in the vanilla WK as well?
Be it for people who can’t (or don’t want to) use user scripts. Be it because user scripts could end up not being maintained in the future. Or simply for pride, should they depend on their clients to make WK a good service?
It works. And the whole community is thankful to you guys for making WK really useful with the user scripts you’ve made. But I think the Tofugu developers could spend more time on necessary features and less on redesigning the front page for the 11th time…

I hope what I wrote doesn’t sound too harsh, I appreciate the work and time Tofugu has put into WK. But I also think this is really a too often overlooked feature. Not all items can be memorized with the usual stages in an efficient way. At least that’s my belief.

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I really don’t think it’s a necessary feature. To each their own, I guess. I never felt like I needed to tend to my leeches

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Thanks for your support =D

I trust the WK team to know what they’re doing, so if they see this and decide it’s not high priority, or even simply not necessary, then that’s ok. I just hope they read it so at least the idea has entered their heads as something to consider, even if the answer is “no” in the end. It’s not their fault I can’t use scripts haha! And I know a significant part of this is just my own laziness that I don’t spend as much time as I should in lessons, and I don’t always try and recall properly in reviews. There’s nothing they can do about that; it’s my own problem. Having said that, I really think that this could be a helpful way of supporting those few kanji/vocab that just don’t stick for some people.

I do agree that, at least in my own opinion, the principle behind userscripts is as a temporary measure for us to improve our own experience immediately without having to wait for the WK team to give us an update. I do believe that they should check out the scripts being made regularly though, and consider adding some of them to the normal WK system (as they have been doing to a certain extent, it seems!).

In the meantime — that’s a good idea you have there, to just test myself quickly at the start and end of review sessions using the summary page. It could be just as quick and effective, so I’ll definitely give it a go. =)

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Yeah, perhaps not “essential”, but still potentially a good bonus I’d say. It’s my personal preference to try and do something about my leeches — they really bug me when they go round and round for so long haha! You’re quite right though, I could just as well leave them and at some point they’d sort themselves out. I guess I’m just not patient enough! =)

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I think it’s fine to suggest it, btw, I was just mentioning that there are already ways to do it in case you’d be interested

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Thanks :smile::+1:t2:

Thanks for the suggestion! We’ll take a look at this and see if it’s a feature we’re interested in building. :+1:

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Thanks for considering. I appreciate all your hard work! :smile::yellow_heart:

I would love this. Even if all it did was insert an extra review in the current session, it would be awesome.

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On the review summary page after a review session, if you click (lt) an item to review it’s details and then go back to the review summary, it will go back to an old review summary from a previous session. One always has to remember to “open in new window” in order to preserve the current review summary or else ruin the entire review summary page. Anyone else find this annoying? I occasionally make this mistake and can’t review the rest of my wrong answers.

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