In this sense, a leech is a word that you just aren’t learning, for one reason or another, so it stays in your review queue forever, slowing you down. Once you get enough of them, they can be a major detriment to an SRS system like WK because you spend all your time trying to review things that never clear instead of learning new things and carrying on with the system.
Much like a real leech drains your blood and can make you sick and fatigued, these words drain your mental energy and time, making it harder for you to continue learning.
My leeches tended to be baseball terms and military rankings in WK. And indeed, I’ve actually put WK on vacation mode recently because it felt like all my reviews were leeches and weren’t really doing much for me (for now). I may come back to it later at some point, but decided that my time was better spent doing more reading or listening and learning words I wanted to know rather than failing 少尉 vs 少佐 for the umpteenth time.
now I get it… here’s why leeches haha! I already have some if I’m not wrong, words that I can’t learn and periodically fail and they remains in the queue. But I see that one thing is having 5 leeches, and another thing is being merged under hundreds…
Fuck! I didn’t knew I was going to learn such things! Now that you make me think about it, they could become pretty extenuating.
From the desperation of @shuly ’s last message I guess there is nothing at all we can do about it then.
Has there ever been an actual discussion about it with some moderator or stuff members here on the forum? A poll or something?
I believe there are some scripts that people have written to try and tackle it, and the Extra Study Mode that WK recently added is a good way to to about it (if you look at the word more, it will stick eventually), but yeah, it’s a difficult thing to try and fix. Others would be better served to answer what scripts exactly to look into for the issue.
It’s been pretty widely talked about, and the Extra Study Mode being added tells me that the WK staff are aware of the issue and trying to come up with solutions. It’s just not an easy thing to tackle, unfortunately, and different things will work for different people.
When I had some really bad ones, learning the kanji stroke order and writing them by hand helped a lot. Anytime you come across something in the wild, in a book or a manga, that gives your brain something to connect it to as well, so that helps. It’s just a multi-pronged process and I don’t think there is a Holy Grail solution, unfortunately.
I see, nothing is easy, especially for a platform as big as WK. Having the chance to jump the leeches if you’d like to, seems like something that should be implemented tho. Of course it would be limited to a specific amount of elements such as words purposely marked as unnecessary, or something like that. But I see that there could be many problems I’m not considering
Everything post-Volume 1 is grouped by Volume. Volume 1 is grouped by chapters, since there was a lot more interactivity, being a larger club at the time, and it wiuld have been a nightmare to have the whole book in one club. Now that we are a smaller group, by volume works well.
Finished 1st Vol of Moto!!! Really just needed to sit down with it for a bit and wrap it up… easy but sometimes got hung up on the little kid speech (like yotsuba)… reading it wrong sometimes …
then tomorrow to try to finish vol 3 of a different series … that kind of been picking up and putting down… just being lazy … this will be the weekend to complete stuff!!!
So I’ve been trying to buy the ebook version of volume 1, but I keep running in to problems. I tried it both in Rakuten (Kobo) and Amazon Japan (Kindle) but it doesn’t actually give the option to buy it… Then I had a stroke of inspiration last night… I VPNed in to Japan, then went into private browsing mode… And it worked! Apparently, Amazon Japan geo-locks Kindle purchases so you can’t buy it when you’re outside of Japan (I didn’t try Rakuten but I assume it’s the same situation, if you’re a Kobo reader). But I made another discovery! Until July 13, Volumes 1-4 are FREE to read online!
I’m probably going to eventually buy the physical book. But for now, I can finally join this book club and read along! Just wanted to pass the tip along. VPNs are easy to get, I personally use ExpressVPN. I pay for mine, but there’s plenty of free ones out there.
Welcome to the book club! Which app/ program do you use to change VPN?
I suggest you to buy the physical volumes as I did, a month ago I ordered volumes 1-6 from the Japan Amazon store (price is actually very low and shipping to Europe was 10$)
Have fun
For real? Is it so much more expansive to ship from Jap to USA? I thought that the distance was the more determining factor
From where I live Tokyo is 10k kilometers in a straight line
Oh ok the weight of the parcel makes part of the price but still I’m surprised that it costs almost the double than for Italy… must be USA import policy (I’m assuming you’re from USA)
actually importing from Japan to the US isn’t a big deal…we get a large allowance so there generally are not duties…it’s just shipping from Japan is expensive… so what I usually do is make sure I have 5 books min and then pull the trigger… 5 books at 6 a book and then 30 to ship makes each book 10 with the exchange rate (buying new of course)… vs 6+20 for one book…
CDJapan recently changed their system (it annoys me so because now it’s easier to spend)…but if you find say a new flying witch volume you want to buy you can add it to an existing order (even if you used points or coupons)…so it makes it easy when you have placed pre orders that are going to be a month out or whatever… then oh here’s another one and not get hit with a huge shipping bill for a single item. CDJapan is usually more on shipping the Amazon (to the US usually)…but their packaging and service is bullet proof…Amazon… doesn’t always pack things well and have had books damaged (the refunded but it was still annoying). I also do like to support CDJapan when I can…Amazon has plenty of money already haha
Anyway yeah welcome to book shopping…guard your wallet… and with people like @ChristopherFritz around sharing a few snips from this author I’ve been having fun spending more than I should but eh…life is short
Thanks! I use ExpressVPN… I pay probably $75 USD a year for it (well, I share it with my dad and brother cause you can use multiple devices, so it’s really only $25 a year)… but honestly just get whatever’s free that allows you to select your own location.
I do plan to get the physical volumes… But not until I’m farther along. Maybe a reward for reaching Level 30 on WK. Or whenver I visit Japan next, which the way things are shaping up, probably won’t be until the end of 2023 or early 2024.
I used to buy from CD Japan too! I always found their prices and shipping reasonable. I would bundle a bunch of purchases together though… Then I’d drop maybe $300 on one order. Of course, hard to do for in demand stuff. And they ran out of certain products I wanted before I could get it.
now I get it… here’s why leeches haha! I already have some if I’m not wrong, words that I can’t learn and periodically fail and they remains in the queue. But I see that one thing is having 5 leeches, and another thing is being merged under hundreds…
sounds legit
