I speedrunned wk in a year, and that was great. I continued review for about 9 month, it was also great. Then in feb this year life got me and I had to drop reviews.
I now face a wall of 2351 unburned items that take too much toll on me.
I am shaky on some burned item, but not the majority. And the spread is huge.
Current
I see two possibilities:
reset to level X
unburn a lot of stuff / everything
reseting is an issue, as for one kanji I wish to relearn with what WK provide I will have to review a lot of items I donât care about.
unburning only items I care about have too much overhead I donât have the time for, to hunt for them
Idea
Iâd love to tackle this with the review framework. I tried (and use) other SRS plateform, but for pure kanji learning there is none that equals what WK has to offer.
Iâd love to have a wk ng+ option, which would be similar to a reset but with the option to reburn item on lessons.
The difference with unburning everything is to have lesson to control the workload.
Have you considered downloading a script that lets you reorder your reviews and using that to throttle the daily reviews youâre tackling so that youâre only reviewing a small portion of those items at a time?
You could set it to give you all of your apprentice level reviews first, for example, and then guru, then master etc. That way, you would still be able to hit those 4 hour and 8 hour review intervals on those items and move them along to the next SRS stages without them getting buried in a massive pile.
If you did this, you could just aim for doing a consistent (and reasonable) number of daily reviews, like 100 or so a day, and you would gradually get through the pile without having to spend the whole time fighting the SRS and your own memory.
Many of the higher level reviews will drop back down to apprentice and guru, but as long as youâre clearing the apprentice and guru items first every day, you shouldnât get too swamped by the higher level stuff coming back, and if you stay consistent with the number of reviews you do every day, eventually your WK reviews will resume a more normal pattern instead of coming back in huge clumps.
I believe the most robust reorder script is currently this one:
Quite frankly I think anything that encourages level 60s to stay on this site longer is a bad idea. Some people are already overly dependent on this site enough as is and have trouble leaving even if itâs for their own good.
Being shaky on some burned items is normal. So was I. Burned is just an arbitrary level that wk decided and doesnât actually mean youll know it perfectly nor you should. I think youâd be doing yourself a massive favor by trying to leave the nest.
Piling on with Vanilla on this one, youâre not supposed to stay here. Itâs time to read! If you donât know something use dictionary and if you want SRS, put it in an Anki deck. there is no reason to run through things again. If you forgot its because you werenât using it in the first place.
Came back here after years just to say I support this idea lol.
I can see why this is against the principles of the wanikani method, but I think if you already finished the system once there is no harm in doing whatever you want.
Some people arenât able to study japanese for 2-6 years straight, shit happens in life and you have to change your priorities. Getting back into the studying rythm would be a lot easier if you didnât had to spend time also reviewing the stuff you already know.
We already have the free review option. I feel like this could be implemented by being able to do a placement test on each level, and if you missed any items you could chose to put it on your to-learn list again. So a kind of free-learning mode.
Consider this the ânow you can play with Luigiâ option.
Like Vanilla said Iâm not too sure about this. I havenât even been studying for a year, but I can already tell just immersing in native material is MUCH more effective, not to mention fun, than what youâre proposing and going through thousands of kanji and reburning them just to find the few that youâre having trouble on. Plus you have to pay, and at that point itâd be easier to make your own Anki deck.
Iâm not opposed to this idea, because I would totally never use it at all, but I donât see the merit in it
Agreeing with Vanilla as well, my whole game plan is to get to level 60 and immediately start trying to move away from WaniKani. I love WaniKani and what itâs done for me, but getting me familiarized with kanji is all it can really do for me, itâs giving me the basis to pursue the loftier goals we have in Japanese.
Anyway, go read, the kanji youâre shaky on will appear in text, see it a few times and itâll be significantly more helpful than reviewing it on WaniKani. Do you want to be stuck on WaniKani or do you want to learn more Japanese? It may be tough to suddenly have to manage everything yourself now, but this is how you will learn.
Just do your reviews as normal but view your Enlightened items as your new lessons queue.
Once youâve tackled the existing pile and have apprentice and guru items back under control, you might try the burn manager scrips to go through 1 levelâs kanji at the time. Review items until guru, then reburn them. This is just a refresher course no need to do it all the way to actual reburn.
Thatâs what I did for myself after taking a nearly 1year hiatus. I didnât have a waiting pile since I was on vacation mode but itâs still a doable way to get back into it.
For myself, Iâve gotten alot more mileage using SRS for writing kanji which significantly helps distinguishing similar looking kanji issues; probably my #1 problem with the more kanji learned, the more one can get lost. Iâve also gotten alot more mileage from SRSnâ WK context sentences. Particularly vocab from levels 50+ really have little meaningful use in isolation in my experience. I like the sentences, they are complete thoughts (as opposed to some sources extracted from unknow context), they are fun and colloquial with humorâŠand if Iâm missing the vocab, I just pick them off and add them to my vocab decks. Since some are abstract, so less collocation dependency as well which helps and added challenge.
I think most have some kind media consumption of some kind already or application towards other language goals, its sort of implied plus it is fun. I still like SRS because it holds me accountable on a schedule and expose my weak areas daily even if life gets busy (something Iâd probably not do with just media onlyâŠit would get lazy quick). SRS can be used in alot of ways, just not vocab which can get boring. I took WK more as an intro course for familiarity and nothing more given the inflexibility of the content and platform (probably what they intended too). The common issues like kanji distinction and vocab context just doesnât get ironed out in the platform itself.
Still not at level 60 myself, so take this with a grain of salt, but I came to WK after many years of studying Japanese in classroom settings (High School, College, self-study and night classes after) because nothing else I tried to learn Kanji really stuck.
And I find that while WK is really great for drilling in new kanji, it also contains a lot of kanji (and, even more so, a lot of vocab words) that I already know and feel confident reading.
I donât really mind this usually, as Iâm usually okay taking the slow road with WK lessons and reviews and having some things I already know in there is fine and sometimes even makes me feel better.
But lately I have been trying to study for the JLPT and itâs annoying to have to go through again all the ones I already know.
So, with that in mind, I am currently using the following 2 scripts to help with that:
WaniKani Item Filter to mark items I already know and (as long as I use the same computer for reviews) skip that item when reviewing
That said, if youâre already level 60, probably just the first script above plus selectively unburning items you feel really shaky on is best, provided you donât want to switch to a different platform / way of studying as others have suggested.
Thanks for all these kind replies. @fallynleaf thatâs a fair idea, seing that it can order items by level may do the trick even if itâsnât perfect. Iâll give it a go later on.
@Vanilla@WaniTsunami@SpacemanSpiff@HaseebYousfani
While I get your point, youâre taking the assumption that users of this idea (and by extension, myself) are kept trapped in WK and donât go to the next step (read stuff & other).
I am not. And I assume most of potential users wouldnât either. What @VictorLino wrote wasnât even in my mind but would also increase its usefulness.
@ekg I wasnât aware of the reburn of items, that can work indeed.
@s1212z I have to admit the last few month I completely went over the context sentences. Thatâs a good help too, thanks. And I agree with your feeling of accountability from a SRS platform.
Iâve done most of my wk trip on an app though (in fact, 59 levels ha ha) as I find it a lot more easy to find the time to review on my phone instead of sitting down on a computer. And as I did lessons in the morning thatâs though to go onto it before begining the day.
I will try to adapt to try the suggested scripts.
I donât think I mentioned this, but do check the OP post for the Burn Manager Script as it also details some limits imposed on the unburning-reburning of items. (if you choose to use this )
I canât remember the details, but something about a grace-period of sorts, so no unburning one day, then reburning the items, but then wanting to unburn them again in too short timespan. - I canât remember the details, but just check @rfindley 's OP post for updated info! or just ask them!
Its apparent from your last reply that you arent really interested in moving on from WK and i dont want to be too pushy here, but i would like to offer a bit different point of view on this since i agree that a lot of people get too attached to WK and it might still offer an advice for other people browsing here (which might not be a case for you, only you can tell! )
To burn an item, you had to correctly answer it at least 8 times over the span of 6 months, so even if you arent absolutely sure about kanji/vocab, i feel like majority of missed items would be something you were 50:50 on or you had general idea, but missed the exact meaning / reading (this is true even for 1y break)
If you did this NG+, then taking those items and putting them back to apprentice 1 state and having to again correctly answer it at least 8 times would be really inefficient and im sure it would feel demotivating to see items like this constantly in your review pile and knowing that you arent really learning anything new - you might even burn out from this since it would be such a slog without any tangable rewards.
With something youve seen so many times, its often enough to just look it up once, have an eureca moment of âah i know that one from WKâ and as long as you encounter it again in next few months, youll automatically reinforce it. Its not that still doing WK is complete waste of time, but focusing on it too much and trying to be perfectionist here just to battle few leeches over and over again will just cause you to eventually forget other things youve learned here long time ago, you basically cant win this and know all the items perfectly.
If you are trying to immerse, which you said you were, but you still want to try to do those reviews then thats fair (after all, im also level 60 and doing reviews), i would recommend the same thing as fallynleaf - trying to order them (basically any ordering works), that way you can get at least some items in the correct SRS timing and as you do more and more reviews, majority of stuff you will see will be recurring reviews, but youll also slowly encounter new and new stuff from the big review pile that will become part of your recurring reviews, which is pretty close to your idea of âdoing only lessons on unknown itemsâ i feel like
I just wanted to comment on this part: This is totally normal. Just donât sweat it.
I would say that âburnedâ items on WK means that you have a fairly good chance of remembering it later on when you need it and thatâs all. This is good enough to get you on the way to reading without being totally overwhelmed (and resulting in failure) and itâs the best thing about a tool like WK in my opinion.
My personal experience is that kanji I learned a decade ago are burned into my brain much much more than I feel with kanji that Iâve just burned on WK. It takes time for that to happen and I donât think you can accelerate it.
Itâs more like the assumption that youâll be spending more time on wanikani. Which really isnât a crazy assumption.
Time spent on wanikani is time not spent elsewhere. Thatâs the problem. Anything that encourages you to spend more time on here is by extension likely to take time away from other stuff. And for the users who would reply back with âwell the time I would be spending on wanikani I wouldnât use on other studying anywaysâ, thatâs the problem too .
Your time is better spend elsewhere and you need to find other stuff to replace the time spent on wanikani in your study routine. Delaying the inevitable isnât in your best interest.
)
or just ask them!