As I moved into the mid-20’s and 30’s levels, I’ve learned to get much stricter with myself about items at Master → Enlightened or about to be burned. I use @rfindley’s Double-Check v2, which I find absolutely invaluable—not for being able to count marked-wrong answers right but for its ability to override by marking things wrong.
So it’s amusing to me that most discussions here about Double-Check revolve entirely around its ability to “undo mistakes” — whether it’s a form of “cheating” (or, less ethically-charged, of hurting yourself in the long run) or not.
I do sometimes use the ‘redo’ function—when I fat finger (especially okurigana—like typing “otozuteru” when asked for the reading of 訪れる), or when I’m not caffeinated-enough yet or I’m having a brain-foggy day and just completely faceplant by thinking I’m seeing 元気 when I’m seeing 天気 or something like that I know I have down cold.
But below I want to talk about why, 私自身は, Double-Check’s greatest gift is marking accepted answers wrong — and how, over time, doing so has become a strangely pleasant part of my study.
This feature is so important to me that — now I have Enlightened items coming up in review every day, and lacking an “unburn” option other than Resurrect — the couple times WK server-side changes have made Double-Check temporarily stop working, I’ve held off on reviews. (You can do workarounds like doing ten reviews at a time and just closing the Review tab if you want to keep WK from recording an Incorrect you want marked Correct, but you can’t do the reverse.)
For instance, I make a habit of reading the Context sentences when something Burns (but before “accepting” it when using Double-Check by moving to the next item), and the other day when I (re-?)discovered that 供給 (きょうきゅう, supply) meant “supply” as in “provision” — and not “supply” as in “supply and demand” or “water supply” as I’d thought — I marked it wrong, because I don’t want that “right English gloss, wrong meaning” to stick in my mind.
So I’ve adopted a policy that if:
- I can’t immediately remember the meaning without resorting to mnemonics;
- I can’t quickly remember the reading (I’ll allow myself a few moments to think about it, if it’s a less-common item or has unintuitive rendaku or other reading shifts);
- I feel hesitance over both the reading and meaning (slight hesitance for one or the other is okay);
- I feel like I “lucked out” with a guess; or
- Checking the Context, I discover I had the wrong idea about the word, like with 供給 above;
I do not let an item Burn.¹
In addition, for kanji items, if I do remember the meaning and a reading immediately, but
- I can’t remember any (important) vocab the kanji is used in;
- I don’t “remember the kanji itself” and instead “figured it out” — which was once a weird idea to me, but after you get near 1000 kanji mastered, it starts becoming possible to figure out a likely reading and meaning for many kanji just from its component construction;
- I forget an important alternate reading (and once again, here Double-Check comes in handy, too — because when I see the “Did you know this kanji has alternate readings?” pop-up appears, I hit delete to try again entering the other reading(s)); or
- I realize I’ve confused this kanji for another similar kanji (usually by collapsing two kanji with a shared reading or meaning into one in my head); or
- I’ve recently tried to type a word with this kanji and been unsure which choice from my IME to pick;
I mark it wrong to prevent Burning as well. (Both of these sets of criteria for Burning I use in a sort of attenuated way for lower levels, too: for instance, I don’t want to still be using mnemonics for anything at Master or beyond.)
I’ve found that not-infrequently, items I choose not to Burn in this way “tumble down” all the way to Guru or even Apprentice upon successive reviews. I now consider that a good thing (honest—I’ve gotten to a point where that gives me a little dopamine hit of success — in the failure!), because it means I’m really going to learn the item this “second time around”.
There may come a time when leeches bother me more, but so far I’ve found that just ruthlessly marking items wrong if I feel I’ve guessed — or if I have to think about a mnemonic for items beyond Guru — eventually clears out items, even if I struggle to get them past Mastered or frequently confuse items like a verb pair.
I came to this feeling of yay, marking this one wrong! shortly after I first started Resurrecting items. Thinking about why I needed to do that led me to hitting that - key (Double-Check’s shortcut for “mark this wrong”) more often, and with greater and greater glee. Let me explain:
Burning a kanji is one of the usual circumstances when I’ve been Resurrecting burned items. When I realize I’ve smushed a ‘newer’ kanji (well, a >5-month-old kanji if I’m Burning it, but still) in my head into one with a similar early-lesson Burned kanji, I resurrect the Burned one.
But at the same time, I also mark the Enlightened one I got right — but realized I’d had confused with the Burned kanji — wrong. By the time it comes back in a month, I’ll have seen the old Resurrected one several times—in fact, they’ll probably now both be at Master again within a few days of each other. Which is what I want—to know these as two separate kanji. (I suspect the usefulness here is the reason later lessons tend to introduce extremely-similar kanji together—less chance to smush them together in your mind.)
The other circumstance I’ve been Resurrecting kanji is when I consistently am misreading it in new vocab. For instance, I kept thinking 場 (Location ジョウ・ば) had a reading ショウ or ショ through interference with 所 (Place ショ・ところ), so I resurrected it and have now Burned it a second time—and I don’t get its reading confused anymore.
Here, I use Double-Check in a bit more fiddly way. For example, let’s say I see 劇場 (げきじょう, theater):
- I know it’s theater, but I read it げきじょ. That’s a rendaku of 所, not a reading of 場.
- I see my mistake immediately. I hit
⌫for a Double-Check “redo”, and try げきじょう, which is accepted. (I find this better for getting wrong readings out of my brain than just reading the correct one. I also hear the correct reading’s audio, which further helps.) - I hit
-to re-apply the incorrect mark, and press⏎to go on with reviews and let 劇場 come back, when it will be demoted.
The fiddling here is, I think, helpful, in that it gives me extra reinforcement and time to consider Resurrecting 場 and/or 所.
And it feels good — like breaking a bad habit!
I, for one, am now glad of the demise of the old “after-action report”—the page that used to appear after reviews, giving you a percentage score and showing you your results for each item. Why?
Because I think that big percentage number, striving for getting it at 100% or 90% or whatever—led in my mind to a sort of gamification that made me less likely to mark things I was shaky on wrong (and more likely to give myself a second chance, to convince myself it was “just an ‘oops’). The dopamine hit only happened in getting reviews right.
That’s the correct association if you’re in school and you want good grades. But it’s the wrong association with WaniKani, when you’re studying for yourself and you really should want to prioritize true learning over a “score”.
And for that, I’ll happily mark stuff wrong every day.
Footnote
¹ There are actually two related circumstances I let a kanji I don’t have “down cold” slide:
- When it’s a kanji with just one common reading used in a single vocab or single related set of vocab and the vocab hasn’t yet Burned.
- When it’s a kanji you always see only in some very specific contexts (like some counter kanjis) and I have trouble recognizing it only because it’s out-of-context and I’ll never see it out of context in real life (even in a name).
But in both cases, only after I verify outside of WaniKani vocab that one of these is really the case — I check my Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary for this, which helpfully groups vocab by reading and use and tells you if a kanji is also a common name kanji.