Noticed I am on Level 15 and had a nice burn session today. I passed NLPT 2 years ago but did not keep up with studies. Still mostly review but WK is finally beginning to get interesting. Certainly kanji I am learning for the first time for vocab I know already.The example sentences are very good reading also.
Feels like a long road ahead…
Are you stalking me? 
But can they break the level 60 curse?
I personally believe it’s not possible. Even Leebo’s been unable to do so. Some say he’s been stopped by the Level 60 curse several times over.
Why would you quit? There’s an easy motivation: money. I have to pay for this service so I’ll be damned if I don’t use it.
I see what you did there hahahaha, love it
Cant say I noticed any curses out there, no doubt its hiding waiting to pounce when im at my weakest.
I do have some cursed leeches though. Note to self, get the repaired leech script 
I can image that’s when the motivation in some people might die off or where people realise they’re not that serious about Japanese.
Funnily enough, according to wkstats, level 15 was the quickest level that I completed.
I think I recently suffered from a level 18 curse …
I usually level up in about 8-9 days but level 18 threw me off for some reason and it took me 11 days XO
Finally having reached level 15 myself and feeling the “painful” I just found this thread and wanted to leave a
yay!!! 
Keep pushing through 
I found this thread way too late, and I’m not sure what would cause this, but I actually did not experience the curse. However, I did have a lot of free time around that period. So maybe that’s what allowed me to avoid that? Also, I was living in Japan back then.
there is no curse. there’s a critical mass of leeches that hamper learning new content, and there’s waves of old items cycling through, and many lvl 10-20ers experience it for the first time and call it “curse”.
i call it “challenge”.
Kinda same here - not including 1 & 2, Level 15 was my second shortest level after 14 - I had no idea about this “curse” and I think the whole thing is a buncha 牡牛くそ. I read a reply earlier of someone saying “It’s only a curse if you believe it’s a curse” and I couldn’t agree more. Just keep plowing through those lessons and reviews - keep slaying those leeches and put an end to this Lvl.15 curse myth.
mic drop… ?
I’ve read this question once I was still starting wanikani and now I am at level 14 and I think I know what is the cause. I was fast and enjoyed ever level I have accomplished. I studied 1 hour in the morning and one in the evening.
And some time around level 14 the „burned“ kanjis kicked in. So I was super overloaded with new stuff I’ve learned and the burned ones which returned after the designated 4 months. Since then i couldn‘t tackle anymore new lessons and I am stuck at level 14.
I guess it is the cumulation of all the new kanji you learn and repeat and the ones you will be asked again, approxmiatly at the time you hit level 14 / 15. Depends how fast you were.
Yep. I have seen some people with burns at Level ⅞ — while many of us burned around 14. Whatever works, though!
all in all, this does not look to be depending on level solely, more likely this is time-based thing.
backlog which is ready to be burnt is sitting in the pit and watching your steps, reading its… claws, teeths, club, etc.
so that - half a year with more-or-less stable speed, and not high %% of good answers.
there are ordes of leeches behind, and more of them are ahead. that’s why… you are busted at this point, and its good if you get through this pincer attack from those wanikanianides.
breezing with average ~6d22h, this pit seems to be waiting at around 25-27 levels… all that is left is to prepare everything by that point to survive…
been cursed since the beginning…leeches everywhere…but I started after WK changed to the new pneumonics and wk static srs…so if anyone is feeling bad about leeches…
don’t…cuz im in hell…and I spent a over a month at level 10 with no new lessons drilling leeches…and then 2 months when they came back again…fell back down an filled up apprentice and guru…at level 16…now they are all back again because of the static SRS system …i swear it’s impossible to remember so many…so now I’m going really slow limiting new lessons based on the next days review count instead of apprentice items…just added 20 lessons tonight…which is why apprentice is at 104…but usually this is around 60-80…
more than half my apprentice items are leeches…and almost half of the guru items are…going round and round in circles…and then when you learn the “wrong” because of srs it’s practically impossible to unlearn/re-learn them…wk is great but ugh…for the love of…give us dynamic srs so those of us with lousy memories aren’t buried with reviews that don’t get anywhere… Guru 2 Level and Enlightened are the worst intervals for me!
it might be better to look around and start knowing your enemies in face. there are different methods, just find your own way.
if default intervals are too big for you, run self-quiz in the middle - this can help to detect forgotten kanji/vocab earlier, putting them to the review again.
besides, on writing a kanji severtal times, some associations might be formed for this specific kanji. and these ones are more permanent than the mnemoincs from kanji/vocab description.
yes, it takes time to go this way. but, if the goal is to know kanji, their meaning, and then to be able to read texts, this is actually might be the shortest way to reach the goal.
at some point, semantic-phonetic composition can be applied to such difficult kanji too, and keeping doing it with all kanji might really improve and speedup the learning process.
this might be also said that this way kills SRS, but you can manually fail some of reviews to get them pushed back to earlier stages and then follow SRS normally.
I think you missed my whole point… I already have been doing this… Spent over 3 months not doing new lessons reviews only studying leeches… Of course I’ve used all the stupid scripts… Manual flash cards exporting lists and sorting etc…
Nothing works… I was just sharing so if others think they have trouble or lots of leeches they probably don’t… I’ve spent countless hours on this and honestly I wish wk would implement dynamic srs (or ghost reviews or something) so people like me wouldn’t have to fail burns multiple times… And maybe give us the option for the old mneumonics (I signed up after they changed)… Or some of form of very vivid offensive mneumonics that would actually stick… Yes I can make my own but if I have to do this for 30 to 40 percent of the wk items what’s the point of using wk at all? So I just accept the limitations of this srs system and my lousy memory and repeated them over and over again… Sucks yes… But if wk does absolutely nothing to help users with leeches and you’ve tried everything… Not a lot left to do but slow down and beat them in slowly. Sometimes for those that think it’s a curse… Meh it’s just not easy to learn Japanese… And some people have better memories.
I haven’t read this whole thread, but I’m feeling your pain here. For me WK’s SRS intervals after Guru 1 are perfect for showing me things I’ve just forgotten. It’s very frustrating.
Just in case it gives you some ideas for stuff to try next: I’m currently focusing on getting all vocab into KameSame (all burned items, and gradually everything else by ascending level) which seems to help with the unexpected pronounciations particularly (as well as generally, because of the double-SRS). I also have all WK kanji up to my current level in Anki, set to give me 10 random new ones per day - that’s been good too, because the SRS works better.
(btw: mnemonic 
)
