Not down to level 1, mind you. Let’s not be overly dramatic.
I’ve been on break from WaniKani for a long while. Some serious monthage, to be sure. I haven’t stopped studying Japanese, and in the admittedly leisurely-paced classes I’ve been taking, we’ve just about gotten to the end of Genki II. Stopping WaniKani was a calculated choice. To stay on top of my reviews, I needed to dedicate the lion’s share of my daily study time to keeping up with my reviews. (My own fault, I attempted to max-speed WK.) My listening and speaking skills were lagging, so I stopped to focus on them. No regrets there.
Now, though, I’m feeling ready to dive back into Kanji, and I’m faced with a dilemma.
Oof. And there’s going to be a lot of failed reviews there that consistently jump back in line every few hours. I’ve taken down a review mountain of 1,300 before, but this may be too much.
I’m thinking of resetting down to level 30. Keep all my well-burnt turtles where they are, and start from scratch on the stuff I’ve most severely lost touch with. What do you all think? Good idea, bad idea? Should I just leave WK be so I can remain a perfect level 42 forever?
Somebody recently gave some advice I think is wonderful; use Self-Study Script and focus on specific levels, starting where you think you’ll feel comfortable and work your way up from there. The first level you feel uncomfortable with is where you need to reset from.
I stopped for 2 months ~ level 39 but never stopped studying and left it on vacation mode because I didn’t feel like seeing a big number upon return…but in the end it didn’t really matter. I had about 3 weeks of daily 200+ reviews of what I wanted to do and review performance was definitely not that great but I didn’t care because the SRS worked by recirculating. I had to go back to kanji/radical fundamentals on a some but that was expected. But many I knew and was able to get on the second pass.
Can’t speak for you but I don’t see the point in resetting in general. You will probably burn a bunch. Getting low reviews rate and having a pile is just a psychological battle IMO. If you encountered them already, it’s in the brain somewhere and looks like you had alot of great alternative practice so you will probably do better than you think. And if it’s absolutely horrible, of course resetting is an option.
Yeah, I mean, ultimately the experience isn’t that different between resetting and just doing the lower-leveled reviews first. But the psychological benefit of hitting 0/0 isn’t something to be overlooked.
I was in the same spot 2 days ago. As you said there will be a lot of failed review which will increase the load of next couple days maybe? If you feel like you won’t burn after the 2k reviews and keep on afterwards I would advice aiming for 0/0. If I were to reset that many levels and relearn most of the stuff I learned before, I might had burned halfway through.
I think it`s a good idea, but maybe instead of reseting to level 30, maybe reset to something higher. You could go into reviews and by using reorder script see how many reviews it will shave off your pile.
You are right, the experience is not that much different so it’s just a personal preference in the end. But I find there is low hanging fruit on every level and resetting those kanji/vocab is not worth it to me. There are scripts to re-order reviews by level so that is another option to burn first. And poor percentages are not a failure either (to me at least), that tide can change quickly. Sounds like you have your answer though, good luck on your review travels!
Try to go through all the reviews, but, even if you level up at some point, don’t do any lesson. Just wait until reviews become boring, and then start doing lessons again.
After 1 and a half years of being stuck on the same level, bringing myself to sit down and go through the ~2000 review mountain multiple times because of my stubbornness, only to end up back where I was a few weeks later, I finally decided to reset about 10 levels last week and it was the best decision I could have made. If I had only done that at first I would have been level 60 by now
I did it (only from level 27, but back to 1), and I don’t regret it. I was abroad for a month, and foolishly thought I could keep on top of my reviews, but actually came back with about 3,000 of them. I beat my head against that brick wall for a few weeks, but was making such little progress that it felt like a waste of time. Starting again allowed me to keep the pace under control (and it was also just after the radical overhaul, so I got to learn the new radicals as well).
In mid December I came back to WaniKani after a ~5-6 month hiatus and had ~3000 reviews waiting for me. It wound up really not being that bad. Set myself a goal of getting down to 0 by January 1st. To do that, I only had to take that number down by ~200 a day. Very doable.
Granted at that time you will have a ton of Apprentice and Guru cards and it takes probably a couple weeks more to flush all that out to where you can take lessons again. But in the end I got back on track and was quite happy I hadn’t reset down to a lower level and thrown away months more progress.
Besides, looking at my WKStats here, to date I’ve had a total of 174,740 total reviews. 2-3000 really isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things.
This huge pile of reviews is not a fun task to tackle at all. Youre just setting yourself up for burn-outs, I mean a lota burn-outs, stress and procrastination attempts + this will occupy all your time.
Studying should be fun and consistent. That way, you can recall what youve learnt more efficiently.
I also resetted once, and I do not regret it. My current pace is a lot slower than the one I started out with, but now I remember more than 90% of all the kanji and vocabulary Ive learnt so far.
I let my brain BREATHE. And I highly recommend, you should let it to.
Personally, I think resetting down to 30 sounds like a good idea. I just reset to 4 from somewhere in the 20s after several years, and even though I still remember several of the things I’m learning, it’s actually having the positive effect of reinforcing those kanji in my mind.
As long as you’re not rushing to reach the golden 60, I think resetting would be a good way to review some things you might have been shaky on, all while getting your reviews down to a reasonable amount.
So, I ultimately decided not to reset. (This is a half-lie. I’m going to reset back exactly one level to erase the shameful stall-out from my account history, but I’m going to do that later.)
Why? Well, the biggest thing holding me back from just doing the reviews in level order until I worked my way back up to my current level was the worry that I’d become too used to the order the reviews came in. If my brain is recalling a reading because “I’m at about the right point in the review session for it”, it might result in some false positives in SRS. But, as I was getting ready to reset, I opened up my reviews to see just how many were waiting in each level through the reorder script. And I happened upon a feature I didn’t even know was there.
Well, if I can just remove levels from my session instead of having to put my reviews in a specific level order, that changes everything. Instead of resetting down to level 30, I’ll work my way through the first 30 levels of reviews in a random order, and just slowly reintroduce the later levels. We’ll see how that works out.
I recently made a script for myself that helps me go through my backlog, if you’d be interested. I made it because in order to get the radicals first and then a specified number of other reviews from the lowest levels in random order takes quite a few clicks. What it does is
1. Place radicals first
2. Sort everything else by level
3. Limit reviews to a specified number
4. Shuffle everything but the radicals
I also made it put reading first and the reading and meaning back to back, as you can with the original reorder script.
If you’d like I could post it for you. There is no interface yet, but if you’d like only some of the features it would be easy to change it for you.
Here’s where it gets tough. Fending off the torrent of 100+ reviews every day. But at this rate, I’ll be ready for a reset to level 40 within the week.
Why reset to level 40? Because I really dislike seeing this in my WKStats:
Yeah, turns out I let myself go longer than I thought. Looks like I’ve had a few goes at returning to wanikani, spent a week or two burning down reviews, and then fell off again. I’ll live with the pair of 70-ish day levels, but I’d like another crack at that… Year and a half level.
