Hi,
I’ve been using Wanikani for about 10 months now and have just reached level 17.
However I recently feel burned out by it. My accuracy is down and I have a hard time working to 200 reviews each day, sometimes more. I also have exams for university coming up which will also be time consuming and I don’t think I will be able to keep this workload.
Do you think it is a good idea to stop making lessons for maybe 1 month and only to do reviews?
I think theres a vacation break feature if here if you want a break so your reviews dont pile up when you get back… but i dont know where it is found and how it really works
Yes! This would be my suggestion: don’t take new lessons, but keep doing reviews.
With a lot of low-Apprentice items in your queue, you should aim for hitting the correct review times, because that helps remember them. But when you have higher Apprentice items and Guru stuff in there… you might be able to get away with only two larger reviews a day. And it will get easier if there isn’t new stuff in it all the time.
For me, this helps. I take these kinds of breaks every few levels, for 2 or 3 days. (One can also call this “being slow”, but I think that’s a good thing. It’s no race.) I find this the best way of pacing myself. You can take off longer even if you want! Just try not to get your review-pile to 500 or beyond
Dropping lessons for as long as you need is totally fine! iirc the general consensus on the WK forums is to only do 10 lessons a day (or less) for a manageable review load anyways, so 200+ reviews a day might mean you’re doing too many lessons in the first place?
Definetly stop with new lessons. Try to keep your apprentice below 100 - as a result you should have 100 or less reviews a day. If you have many reviews it means that many kanji are not correct. Focus on these instead of starting new lessons
I’m currently making a habit to stop new reviews the day before exams in college, so I think that taking breaks from lessons every now and then is great! By just doing reviews like I do on those days I mentioned, your review queue will have a chance to catch some breath and reduce the review counts steadily. I think that if you keep on doing reviews even just for a week, you’re apprentice count will effectively be near zero and from there you can start doing a small amount of lessons to ease in back into your routine Best of luck!
Sounds like a good idea! I’m just getting back into things now after 2 1/2 months where I did not have the time or the headspace to focus on wanikani. For me, I stopped doing lessons completely, and found I was only able to manage maybe 40-50 reviews a week. I know you’re planning to keep going with your reviews, which is a great idea, but if you find that sometimes you can’t manage it, the vacation mode setting is really useful! You can stop and start it as much as you like. My accuracy rates dropped down to below 70% (from a consistent 95%+), but at the moment they’re back at around 90%. It’s a fine line between legitimately saying ‘I can’t do this / don’t have time for this at the moment’ and slipping out of the habit and losing motivation, so if you can keep things going as much as possible then that is great … but be realistic! If you try to do too much you’ll burn out and shoot yourself in the foot. Wanikani will still be there waiting for you after your exams.
Join Team Snails 🐌🏖 Team Snails on Vacation 🐌🏖 I had the same problem, at level 16 as well, level 17 is close but I spent my sweet time on 16, because I had many leeches to take care of.