I got to level 8 when I was deployed last year around June. I stopped WaniKani after I started taking official college courses for Japanese. Now, my 4 8-week courses are done. I learned a lot of Kanji through these classes, but I still want to know more. When I re-upped my subscription, I had 1,200+ reviews to do. I tried, but most of the Kanji and vocabulary are completely lost on me and I sure as hell don’t remember how to pronounce them.
Would you recommend restarting completely? Only to a certain level?
A shame because I just burned my first few items!!
If you tackle it bit by bit im sure youll still be back up to speed faster than if you reset.
And your memory likely just needs a little refreshing to remember the majority of the items.
To put it another way, you dont lose anything by tackling it slowly.
But resetting “might” cost you some time.
I’d recommend not restarting and just letting yourself fail the items you don’t know (look up their info card once you get them wrong), so that way you can keep your burns/progress that you’ve made so far. Just spend a week or so getting your reviews under control.
Definitely up to you and what you feel most comfortable with. From the POV of someone who has reset, I made it to 45 before giving up for something like a year and a half without using vacation mode and I never could seem to drag myself back into it. After resetting to level 30, I was in a much better place to get caught up (1500 reviews instead of over double that, plus no outstanding vocab lessons except for the new ones that had been added since I fell off the wagon). There was a lot I didn’t remember from the later 20s, but it was the right amount for me to re-learn through reviews. At level 8, I’m not sure you can go super wrong either way. Just comes down to your learning style: If you think you can do it, do it! If you think you need that spaced learning, reset back to where you feel comfortable! I will say that the Reorder script helped me play catchup on my reviews because I could go in level order to get the pile emptied of stuff I still felt confident with so I could focus on the stuff I didn’t remember as well. Now that I’m caught back up, the Reorder script has been turned back off.
I had a decent base when I started powering hard to 39. Over two years later I picked it up again: 3000+ reviews in my queue. I chose not to reset, and have just accepted the repeated mistakes to relearn things. I’ve now knocked 3000+ reviews down to 1250 and am feeling more comfortable.
This worked for me, but I can see a benefit to resetting back a few levels if you really felt you didn’t remember any of it. I’d suggest trying to tough it out at first, and if you can’t progress then reset back a bit (but not all the way).
I was at level 7 in late September and then for “reasons” put myself on vacation mode for 4 months. I bought the lifetime membership in December to take the pressure off of having to get through stuff fast, then reset to 2 when I realized how much I completely and utterly forgot.
I’m actually enjoying the review process and my percent correct is way higher the second time through than the first. I’m also going through it much slower. I have a lifetime now! I limit myself to about 10 new items per day, and try to keep the Apprentice queue under 40. Much better pace.
Then its really a matter of mindset and expectations.
You cant expect to get much right on the first pass after such a long time, but you might find things sticking after the 2nd, 3rd or 4th time.
Even if it takes you a month to get back on track, that is still faster than resetting.
In that case id recommend doing reviews untill you have gotten x items (20, 30 or 50 or any other arbitrary number) wrong, and checking up on their meaning/reading, you end your session and give your brain time to solidify a bit. then you return later and do the same thing. Potentially with the help of the reorder script to focus on the reviews in a specific order.
Im not here to force you, but i think its worth considering that memory is not all or nothing and below the surface you may actually still retain a lot of the items once refreshed, you just wont see that on the first pass of an item after your break.
If you dont mind spending longer to get through wanikani, then by all means, reset.
The main thing resetting will do for you is it will get rid of this “wall” you are seeing, that is, it will take all the content that you need to review and make it go away for awhile. It will make things less intimidating, but ultimately you’re just putting off the reviews until later/when you level up again.
Or to put it another way, even if you take these reviews very slow and mess up on them multiple times, it’s still going to be much faster/better for your progress since it’ll take at least 6 weeks to get to level 8 again. If you can get your reviews under control in 6 weeks or less, I’d recommend just slowly chipping away at reviews until they calm down.
I would recommend you just work through your reviews. Even if you get less than 50% that’s still progress on the ones you did get. Just keep working through them until you’re caught up.