Tips for dealing with backlog?

WaniKani
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I worked with WK last year from May to October and reached level 28 but completely stopped studying Japanese at that point as I had to focus on other things. I am now considering subscribing again but am scared at the thought of all the pending reviews waiting for me, a huge bunch of which I will probably fail. Anyone having gone through that process have any advice to share ?

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Different possibilities. Some easy ones: reset to a lower level. Another would be to skim all the reviews with Anki mode (correct /incorrect) which you can do with a userscript/ settings in a mobile app. That way you “get rid” of those you know well, and the rest stays in your review queue, hopefully smaller and now your memory refreshed by the skimming.
Disclaimer: I have not tried any of those methods myself :slight_smile: good luck!

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Here is what I did in a similar situation. I installed a reorder script and configured it to make reviews in ascending level order. Then I did only a manageable number of reviews every day. No lessons, just reviews. When I hit a wall in terms of remembering the items, i.e. I was unable to remember most items, it reset to the level of the items in the wall. This procedure worked great for me.

There is a wanikani setup for ordering the reviews in level order. This setup does not enforce a strict level order. This is why I recommend using a script to make sure you reliably identify the level where you hit the wall


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There is no shame in resetting, considering you managed to work halfway through Wanikani in 6 months. Total reset, or resetting to a low level, like Level 3.

Wanikani teaches only vocabularies inclusive of all lower Levels’ Kanji, not only having the Kanji included; and this can potentially miss out couple of vocabularies that add up to Kanji’s readings and meanings.

Learning such way is probably doable considering having seen lots of Radicals and Kanji. This can be done with Yomichan+Anki, if Wanikani’s workload isn’t too overwhelming. I made this script a while ago and may help – [Userscript] WaniKani JJ External Definition from Weblio (JP) and Kanjipedia

In the past, I cut through no matter how big the backlog, with Reorder Ultimate, which also tells level remaining. However, currently Wanikani has the native feature (which might not be as good).; try using that feature can’t hurt.

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Thanks for the tips everyone. So I was glad to realize upon subscription that I was mistaken as to how it works and nope, scheduled reviews didn’t keep piling up and there is no backlog lol, I just get back to where I was. I have decided to activate vacation mode for a few days while I go through all the levels and assess whether and to what point I need to reset (probably lvl 15-19). It’s not that bad after all.

Edit : vacation mode is activated but I keep getting notifications for new reviews from tsurukame. Wth?

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