And left it for 8 months while I was busy with uni - the usual story. Anyway, so now being so smart I have a normal number of reviews slowly going up as Wanikani won’t know I don’t know some things for many months. I’ve looked back and I maybe remember 50% of the Kanji back to around level 19 (and most before that), and am in the situation of seeing word after word with Kanji I don’t or barely remember.
My question to you kind internet stranger is: do I continue as I am, hoping to one day remember everything again; do some independent study to remind myself of the Kanji, and hope it’s enough to keep going; or jump back to the start of level 19, an irreversible action that will lose six and a half levels of effort, having taken around 3-6 months to complete, but will let me restart learning everything I’m fuzzy on and get it ingraved into my brain again, and hopefully more quickly and completely than last time.
It’s perfectly possible to just continue are you are. Count on failing most reviews, putting them back into apprentice. Once there, you’ll have a chance of learning them anew. Using the Extra study feature of cramming recently failed reviews can also help.
That’s what I’m doing right now. My sub ran out almost a year ago, and I’m only now getting back to WK. Most enlightened items are completely gone for me, so they end up back in apprentice. that’s fine.
Just be more strict with regulating how many new lessons you do, as you’ll be relearning old items. (or you might get too many apprentice items fast)
I took about a 3-4 month break last year and felt the same way and ended up resetting a few levels. After learning those levels again I realized that a quick refresher on some of the mnemonics was all I really needed and things started to stick again pretty quickly. So I would say that I regretted the decision to reset and it really felt like I wasted a lot of time going through those levels again.
However, I know that the time I took a break is basically half of the time you spent away from Wanikani so it might feel a bit more overwhelming for you. I would suggest just going through the last 10 or so levels and read through the mnemonics for all the kanji and vocab and see if they trigger any memories.
I got to level 8 in mid April last year, stopped doing lessons but continued doing reviews until mid July when I activated vacation mode. I came back in January this year and decided to do a complete reset to level 1. Like paulrusu I quickly realized that a mnemonic refresher would have been sufficient for most of the kanji, but I don’t regret the reset at all. I’m not in a hurry and taking a few months to learn mostly known items allowed me to focus on establishing a good routine around WK and other areas of studying without my experimenting having dire consequences for my SRS-ing
Thanks for the suggestions! In that case I might just take a refresher of all the Kanji and keep going from where I left off. Hopefully a few months of reviews will be enough to get them back in my memory!
It’s been a bit over a month and I’m pretty sure this was the right choice. Down to 33 in apprentice and learning around 5 more a day already. I think the fact that the reviews are spread out so much really helped me get through the hard bits one by one rather than tacking a massive amount all at once, and a good number it turns out I did actually remember anyway. It’d still be much better to have not stopped at all, but I’d be tempted to use vacation mode again if I needed to pause in the future.
Thanks again for the suggestions - they saved me a lot of unneccesary time and effort.
