So I took a long break from WaniKani about 2 years …yikes. Ironically I’ve been living in Japan for twice as long now! I’m currently going over the Levels (Radicals, Kanji, Vocabulary) prior to removing the vacation mode. Looking over some the add-on scripts as well but was wondering if anyone’s been there and done that and or if there are any scripts that might help. Look like I can’t use the scripts until I removed the vacation mode as I found a couple that might be useful. I’ve reviewed a a few levels which don’t seem too bad and I’d hate to start all over again as I recall how difficult and long it takes to get back to where you were. Has anyone here been successful in catching up, any tips other than just doing it? Currently studying Daichi 2, and Minna no Nihongo 2. Good luck to all.
You can catch up if you want to instead of resetting. I’ve been too stubborn to reset and it’s taken a while to get my pile of reviews down, but I hope to get even with the srs sometime this week after about half a year of sitting with it. After a 2 year break at level 10 you might have over 1000 items waiting for you but if you do a 100 a day you’ll get to zero sooner or later.
If that doesn’t work you can check by level and see what levels have the most unknown kanji to you. The earliest levels you’d probably know after living in Japan for a while. But reset to the level that gives you the around half the kanji known so you can start back from there.
Either way you don’t have to give up, so welcome back.
Some more advice for if you do decide to take on the reviews head on without resetting. There’s not really a script that’ll make it easier, maybe reorder and back to back to make the order of tackling the items more efficient and answering a little faster, but the hard part is to just do it. And in the future regardless of how fast you do lessons, do reviews every day you can to avoid more collecting like that. Keep in mind that if you take a day to do every review all at once, every review will come back at the same time, so it’s better to spread out the reviews across multiple sessions over time. Wanikani as a whole is a time game, whether you get answer right or wrong the item doesn’t go away until it’s burned, it just gets a longer timer, so clearing out your reviews is a game of managing time to kick the timers into the future so you don’t have so many due right now and ultimately get some manageable number per day rather than however many thousand you have now. Resetting just approaches this differently by pretending some of your lessons never happened and treating those levels as new items completely. Either option is valid, but what’s better is up to you.
I personally wouldn’t reset. I’ve done this many times with language apps through the years and it’s usually a huge time waste in my experience. Since I also use Renshuu (flashcard app), I’d just add the words I’m struggling with to it. Also might be a good idea to get your reviews down to a certain number per day, say below 50 or 100, before adding new material.
I’d say it depends on your goals and general perseverance. I was recently in the same situation and decided to reset to level 5 after a 22-month break. I simply went through every level to see where I started struggling to remember and landed there.
Was it necessary? No! Despite the long break, it seems the knowledge is still kind of there. So I am relearning it without issue at a surprisingly rapid pace! If you want to learn quickly, however, then resetting could be seen as a bad idea, as it is undoubtedly slower. But, I personally found the mountain of reviews quite overwhelming and had no plans to learn at a specific speed, so it was probably good for me!
since you said you had vacation mode on, i guess you won’t have a lot of reviews.
i would just start it up again and if you notice you struggle, you can revisit the whole reset plan. 
With recent changes to the app, it’s hard to know whether the scripts that you’re looking at will even work right now (you would have to look up each one to see whether there has been recent activity or fixes being worked on).
For me, I recently completed level 12 after 11 months of mostly not working on it, with vacation mode and a pile of reviews, and with a couple of failed attempts to tackle the reviews, followed by finally triumphing and getting past it. Since then I’ve gotten back on track and have been moving forward at a reasonable pace of about 12 or 13 days per level.
I never felt a need to restart from the beginning or reset my level, rather I just powered through it, even though it was painful at times, as there were plenty of kanji and radicals and vocab that I encountered along the way that I had absolutely no recollection of having even seen before (OK, maybe some of that had to do with WK moving some things around, but mostly it was because I had not adequately ‘learned’ those items the first time through).
What I did to get myself back on track was a combination of not taking any new lessons and powering through the reviews, 100 or 200 or 300 at a time - and for anything that I missed, immediately refreshing my memory of both the reading and the meaning. My short-term memory is lousy, and so it was a struggle at times, but eventually I got through it, and now I’m moving forward with new lessons as well as not allowing my reviews to pile up anymore.
Thanks a lot for your input… yeah I recall doing all the reviews at once and having a massive queue after going on a trip for a few weeks… forgetting to do the vacation mode. I’m going to try … probably spend 10 days first going over all the radicals, kanjis, and vocabulary and unlock the vacation mode beast!
Thanks good advice, will check that app out.
Every time I reset (two times complete reset to level 1 and one time to level 15), I regretted it. The beginning levels (1-5) are dreadfully boring and I should have just spent some time catching up. In my opinion, there is never a need for a full reset. After an extraordinarily long break without vacation mode, I have successfully went from ~1400 reviews to 0 reviews in about two weeks (100 reviews a day, 50 in the AM, 50 in the PM) it just takes time and patience. Learning for fun should never rushed in my opinion.
Wow, good job … a lot of good info as well… I think there are more levels now as well. I thought there were 50 before. Anyway kanji is fun especially when seeing it here in Japan …kicking myself for stopping but had some medical issues for the entire last year. Good luck to you!
Wow, awesome ! Yeah I’m seeing the light now.
I concur you should not reset all the way. In a similar situation I used the Item Inspector script/ There is a table called All Learned Items that is sorted by level. You go over the items reciting meaning and reading and then you mouse hover the item to see the answer. You go this in order of level and when you find a level where items are too hard to understand you reset to this level. This procedure worked fine for me.
I remember something similiar coming up with the kanji kahoo (or something) I used for remembering the Kanji and the developer said "look, do the 1000 reviews - you’ll get some no question and you won’t have to start over from scratch with every one) - but spacing it out is key - I caught up on a 600 review deficiit one day and I still have batches of 100 or so coming in every once in a while and I only have 500 in Guru - LOL
I think it’s a fine idea. I did it once myself and enjoyed finding the number of kanji that I remembered from before. Yes, some was repetitive but I gained confidence and momentum that I rode as I moved further into uncharted lessons.
I’ve been in vacation mode for at least two years as I shifted from WK to more conversational Japanese. Minna no Nihongo 2? That’s terrific. I did most of the Minna no Nihongo 1 and loved it. Your enhanced vocabulary will, I believe, pay huge dividends as you return to WK regardless of resetting or not.