WaniKani SRS Not Working For Me - I need more control of "Spacing"

WaniKani
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I’ve given it a try for over a year and a half, but I am finding that apparently WaniKani thinks my memory is far better than it actually is. When items come up for burning, I seem to only remember about 50% of them, which indicates they didn’t actually show it to me often enough, and now that I’ve been at it for almost 2 years, I am finding that I have forgotten a lot of kanji/vocab that was “burned” a long time ago.

It seems WaniKani’s SRS system is actually TOO spaced for me, and I would need to see these more times before they are burned, and even after they are burned, I need to at least occasionally have an option to review my burned items. The crazy thing is that in school, any quiz or test that solely required rote memorization were the ones that I ACED so I know I don’t just have a bad memory, I think I just need more control of the repetition, and to not rely on some app for the appropriate spacing.

I remember feeling a bit distrustful of “SRS” systems when I started this WaniKani experiment, and I had the thought that no algorithm KNOWS my memory, the only person in the entire world who KNOWS which things I’ve totally memorized and which things I’m still shaky on is me. I need to be able to SORT these MYSELF so that I can remove the ones that I KNOW I’ve memorized, and keep reviewing ones I haven’t memorized MORE OFTEN.

I’m thinking I’ll have to cancel WaniKani and switch to picking up vocab as I go through youtube videos and creating my own flash card system so I can review more often than WaniKani allows because it is just getting too frustrating doing reviews and not remembering a ton of them because I feel like I haven’t seen them often enough. Maybe the people at WaniKani have amazing memories and they are able to remember a kanji forever after seeing a few times, but they seem to fade with time if I don’t have the ability to sort the shaky ones into a group myself and review them myself as much as I need.

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I agree—a flexible SRS would be handy. I’ve had tons of one-level-away-from-burn (forgot the actual level name lol) items come in recently and only like 60 or so percent of them I remember.

Edit: I do get immersion outside of WK, I also do practice reading and grammar/vocab on Bunpro.

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Sounds like you would prefer anki, where you can customize srs intervals. You can also connect it to yomitan and make anki cards with one click:

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What are you doing outside of WK to practice? You ‘review’ burned items by seeing them in the wild. Since you mentioned YouTube, are you more interested in listening than reading? That may be why WK isn’t clicking for you, since more of a reading resource.

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At your level you’ve already been through the most important part of the course anyway, if it’s becoming too frustrating it’s not a bad idea to move on.

You should definitely consider reading more, you can already expect around 90% kanji coverage with what you currently know. You’re hitting severe diminishing returns just amassing kanji without practice.

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WK and Bunpro take a basic approach to SRS with same fixed intervals for all cards.
You might prefer a platform where you self-grade reviews as hard/normal/easy, so the algorithm can adjust intervals based on that (e.g. Anki).

Another way to get more repetition is to add more words. It’s one thing if you have 3k words on platform, half of which are already “burned” and out of SRS rotation. It’s qualitatively different if you build up to e.g. 9k, or 18k words/expressions/sentences. Each kanji gets used in more cards on average, comes up more often, and the algorithm has more chances to adjust intervals based on your memory.

And of course just using the language is the best form of SRS.

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you can try Kanji Dojo app