I think these two rules are not as helpful as the rest. I think it’s important to study everyday, but you will eventually get tired and burnout. At those points, you will start to question why you are even doing Japanese in the first place.
I think it is more important to come in with a plan. Ask yourself, “What is my ultimate end goal?”
Find that goal and slowly work towards it. Break it down in to small manageable chunks. For instance, I’m working through Genki, and my goal is to do 1 chapter every week. Or when I was going through Wanikani, I tried to get 10 levels done every 3 months.
Also, don’t forget to take a break too. You’re going to drive yourself crazy trying to push constantly. Everyone needs some down time at some point. But again, it’s important to come in with a plan. If you suddenly take a break without a plan, you won’t want to come back. Set a specific amount of time that’s not too long but not too short.
Hopefully, some of this has been helpful. Good luck and persevere! You can do this!
I agree with this. I think downtime is important and a big problem with wanikani imo is that you can’t really take a break for 1-2 years.
Like i don’t know about you guys, but sometimes I have 2-3 days I spend with friends where I literally don’t even have 30 minutes of alone-time to do reviews, and wanikani is just not really designed for it (unless you use vacation mode but I usually try to just do the reviews).
And not doing reviews for 1-2 days already results in huge review piles of 200-300 sometimes which can kill motivation to get going again.
What I’m trying to say: Wanikani is ruthless and once you start you have to dedicate a lot of time for at least 1-2 years to it, DAILY.
Not to be contrary. In my experience, regardless of how little free time they have, people have time for the things which are really important to them. I’m not saying it is wrong that time with/for <insert whatever here> is more important than studying. I’m saying that doesn’t mean there isn’t time to study. Saying there is not enough time is a self limiting deflection of responsibility for a decision.
I mostly agree with you, but I still believe that those two points are important, with all respect to your golden badge.
I am not saying I have to do 2 hours every single day, I am saying I have to do it every single day. That may be just 5 minutes if I don’t feel it. It‘s about building a habit and not questioning this habit is important.
Every single time in the past, when I had an important deadline in my profession and was taking a break from Japanese for a month until was finished with my work, well guess what - I didn‘t return to it.
This time, no matter how hard life gets, I will do my reviews. Even if it’s only a few of them. And if I have a bad day and hate iKnow and WK, and everything Japanese, I‘m still going to do a couple of reviews. Maybe I‘ll feel better after it and can read some other fun stuff.
I agree in a general sense that if you want to have time for something, you have to make some time for it. But there is a big difference when that time has to be available daily, maybe even multiple times, for a long period of time.
I think everybody on a higher level will agree, and it takes a lot of discipline to pull through at times when you’re tired and just want to sleep because you got home at 11pm but your review queue is at 170 and you have to go to work in the morning the next day with no free time until the evening again so it will just get worse.
Do this for over a year straight and you will see why it might be problematic not to be able to take any downtime at all… But that’s just my 2 cents
I’m guilty of always starting and stopping. It’s really difficult to keep with it; even when I’m doing pretty well, inevitably I just get burnt out and tired and want to do something else. It really sucks but I’m trying to keep going, no matter how slow. If I gotta slow down, it’s ok. Just don’t stop. Push through!
I’m at a point where I really need to read more but it’s honestly just discouraging. I can’t find anything that hits the sweet spot of challenging but not too troublesome. I suppose my vocabulary could use some work. Things like NHK easy news are really boring to me and frustrating because I have to look up so many words… maybe I should do a core vocabulary deck but those also frustrate me because I know a fair amount of words so usually the first 600 words I already know and hate digging through to find the ones I don’t. :T
Sigh. Well, hopefully we all can keep going no matter how hard it is!
What worked for me was to make a habit of doing WK multiple times per day, every single day:
once before leaving in the morning
maybe some over the lunch break
again after getting home for the day
once again before going to sleep
That’s an average minimum of 4 times per day to do (small) batches of reviews.
If I have a busy day and miss the first ~3 review times I counted on having, the pileup waiting for me is still only a single day’s worth of reviews.
Compare this to missing 2-3 review sessions in a row when you’re only doing reviews once per day; now you’ve got… ~4 days worth of reviews waiting for you. Then, if you do all these reviews at once, they’ll all resurface together…
TL;DR, just keep taking small little bites out of WK every single day
If you’re level 17 after 5-6 months of WK then you’re going at a fast pace. Maybe just chill it out a little if you’re finding yourself regularly burning out. I started Nov 2017 and I’m only level 21, with an average level time of 19 days. I always enjoy it and look forward to reviews.
Yeah definitely agree, it’s not a race and going too fast can cause burnout. To build a habit you need to do something that doesn’t feel too “painful” or else you won’t keep it up long enough to build the habit.
I could be wrong as there have been several people that have basically speed-run wanikani, but for most people I don’t think that would be a good strategy.
I made sure to change my wanikani settings so that lessons/reviews are all randomly ordered like they used to be. You can certainly go faster by doing radicals->kanji->vocab but getting hit with that massive set of lessons for vocab all at the same time burned me out last time.
It‘s been difficult lately. I do very short reviews with the wrap up function so I don‘t get overwhelmed. That helps.
Lesson 18 is somewhat challenging for me, but I’m doing my reviews every day. It probably will be a longer lesson, maybe 12 days, as I somehow have a huge lesson pile I need to work on.
English is my third language (after German and French), but I got this one from watching Madagascar, the penguin says it before they crash-land the plane.
