I’ve been on WaniKani for 2.5 years and am only level 18. I shot up really quickly in the beginning, but have been in the teens for a really long time.
Combination of letting things pile up on trips and stuff, after telling myself I’d keep up, and not focusing while I’ve been doing reviews, so I get a lot of wrong answers and can stay at the same level for literally months. It also makes it hard to learn new items, because my queue is always large.
I’m getting back on track now though! I realized that instead of sitting down and trying to get through every review no matter what, I set a timer for 25 minutes, and get done well as many as I can in that time. If I know I am spending a particular amount of time, then I can’t rush! Now I am trying to push as many items as I can out of Apprentice and Guru before I learn new items and add to the pile.
When doing reviews I will type in the first thing that pops into my head as quickly as I can to try to train myself to be able to read fluidly and naturally. I only parse the kanji and work through the mnemonic after answering or if I draw a complete blank.
However, if I get it wrong on the speed go, I’ll click ignore and still give myself credit if I come up with the right answer on the first try after thinking about it.
New confession: I get my kicks stalking the Olympians thread and seeing the growing list of people who are below my level and still have hope of making it to 60 before the Olympics
Oh, look, it’s me. To be fair, part of my job requires that I participate actively in Japanese language and culture…so studying counts? Can’t read those 朝打ち合わせ handouts if I don’t know enough kanji.
I use the lesson reorder script, not to prioritise doing the radicals after levelling up, but to shuffle the lesson order and resize the lesson batch, so I get a variable mix of radicals, kanji, and vocab in each lesson batch. I’m finding it’s easier and helps me remember a lot more, as:
I don’t get bored from the monotony of doing only radicals/kanji/vocab in a lesson;
I’m mixing learning new-new things (radicals/kanji) with old-new things (kanji/vocab), so it gives my brain a bit of a break from learning 20 new-new things in a row;
I can very easily control the exact size of the lesson batch – if I feel like I can only handle a few new things, it’s easy to do that, rather than go all the way to the settings. On the other hand, if I can see I have a large number of easy jukugo vocab, I can set the lesson size to 30 and power through them all.
I’m afraid to use the reorder script. I don’t trust myself at this level to assume to know what my brain needs from a pedagogic-learning perspective, in a better way than the preset default experience.
I only ever reorder reviews when I have a huge backlog (due to vacation or low motivation). I frontload high srs, so enlightened first, because I know even if I get those wrong, they won’t be back in queue before I get my reviews down. I tackle apprentice last, because I figure the srs is messed up on those already. When I am back to 0 reviews I can then tackle them at the 4/8 hour marks as well, instead of them still being swamped in a big pile of mixed reviews.
To be fair, part of my job requires that I participate actively in Japanese language and culture…so studying counts? Can’t read those 朝打ち合わせ handouts if I don’t know enough kanji.
