WaniKani made me cheat

Now that I’m burning a fair number of items per week, There’s something that’s bugging me a little. I’ll have two vocabulary items in a review, both using the same kanji with the same reading. The first one comes up and I have no idea what the reading is, so I get it wrong and it resets to Guru. I check the reading to relearn it then move on. I get the second item using the same kanji and get it right (because I just saw the correct reading from the other word). Even though I would have gotten it wrong two minutes ago, it gets burned.

My question is - does this phenomenon mess with the RSS? Should I purposely get the second word wrong or manually un-burn it because I unintentionally “cheated” to get the right answer? Or should I just not worry about it and enjoy the easy burn?

4 Likes

This is something I’ve encountered a lot with SRS (outside of WaniKani) as well. For WaniKani specifically, here’s how I view it:

If you encounter two cards in a row, and they share the same kanji and pronunciation that you did not remember (but let’s assume you recalled everything else correctly), you only need one of the cards to reset to Guru to having the kanji and pronunciation come up in reviews more often. The goal is to learn the kanji and pronunciation, and you can do that with one card.

If you force the second card to be wrong, then you’ll end up with two similar cards going to Guru. This means you’ll be viewing the kanji/pronunciation more often, and that can potentially interfere with the spacing of the SRS.

Thus, I would say if you recognize the kanji/pronunciation on the second card due to having looked it up on the first, you absolutely want the second card marked as correct to prevent it from interfering with re-learning from Guru.

But what if you need to review both vocabulary to learn them better? Maybe it’s better to get both wrong and sent back to Guru (edit: and that will still happen if you get the meaning wrong), but you’ll be learning so much vocabulary through WaniKani, and if you’re using an alternate source for learning vocabulary you’ll be learning so much there, and when reading native material you’ll encounter so much there, that I don’t think it will hurt much in the long run to mark the second as correct for having “cheated” from reviewing the first.

This is what I feel is right and works for me. Others will disagree, and will find resetting both to Guru works better for them.

17 Likes

Exactly my thought as well. In your scenario it was only the on’yomi for one kanji that you forgot, that happened to show up in two jukugo. When you encounter that kanji/vocab in the wild, you will have practiced the reading of the kanji more with that one other card.

4 Likes

Furthermore, if you keep them in the same SRS position, you will keep having that problem. Getting the second one correct will split them up forever.

3 Likes

Plus, if when you come across it in the wild, it turns out that you stumble or get it wrong, then you’ll know to go back and unburn it.

2 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.