WaniKani Study Buddy Race - 2023, All Aboard!

Ive been lurking for a while but this seems like a interesting idea so ill give it a shot :+1:

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The drawing looks like Satoko from Higurashi to me lol

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should be in the settings on the leaderboard.

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ほっほっほっほっほー!

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All should fear the hime laugh.

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Since I’m new to this and just getting started, I’m curious why some people (such as yourself) get to mid levels and then burn out / reset. Can’t you always just stop learning new items, thereby causing the reviews to kind of taper down slowly over time? And then keep learning new items as you have energy / time?

Seems like if you reset you’d be mainly reviewing stuff you already learned with high frequency, which I imagine might be kind of counter-productive. But as I said, I’m only level 4 and a number of people do what you did (there’s even a feature for it) so there must be a reason! And perhaps if you have any wisdom how to avoid that fate, it will spare me the same :nerd_face:

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:100: :call_me_hand:

みなさん、こんにちは!

Thank you for setting this up, @VividStrike. I’m in!
What a fun community building idea for 2022.
Here’s to us all becoming…

漢字の名人

…or at least, those of us that make our daily blood offering to the CRAB

がんばりましょう!

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Like wav said: In the settings (where you can add a user) there is a tab in which you can set the number of tables:

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I can only speak for myself, but my experience was that me taking “a few days off” quickly snowballed into many months off, and when I did eventually return, I had this mountain of reviews (I forget the number but presumably hundreds or maybe a thousand) and it was just too disheartening to sit there churning out reviews and getting sooo many of them wrong because I had so little recollection, having missed all those SRS time intervals that would have helped me remember.

If I had been more organised/wise, I would have switched on vacation mode after a couple of days, and then just picked up where I left off when I was ready to be back in it.

I also made the unsustainable mistake of just cramming things into my short-term memory and hoping the SRS would do the rest, rather than pacing myself and learning a manageable, sustainable number of lessons every day or every week.

My new pace is roughly 10 lessons a day and I think that’s gonna work out great :blush: some days it feels agonisingly slow, especially as I’m redoing levels that I vaguely remember anyways, but I know that setting my WK habit correctly from the start will make a huge difference further down the line, rather than thinking “oh I’ll just change the amount if/when it starts to get overwhelming” - because the moment when I decided “this is overwhelming” was already too late for me (personally) to undo.

I tried resetting a couple of levels, and was still super lost, reset to level 5, still felt lost because I’d forgotten a lot of the radicals and mnemonics, and figured I would just have an overall much more satisfying time if I just do the whole thang from level 1 again :relaxed:

(Sorry for the essay! :green_heart: )

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this happened to me twice only difference was since my level was low it was manageable at 500 or so

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Nope, not an essay at all.

What you shared was so helpful! I believe your story may benefit anyone who reads it.

There is a temptation when you get started with WaniKani to “hit it hard” since they promise that “just over a year you can master 2,000 kanji” and you’re thinking “oh really, little old me?”, and you get these stars in your eyes and all of the sudden you are a senpai ninja warrior ready to scale the mountain and defeat the forces of kanji darkness. Whereas in reality we are all just little 子’s and not like Kouichi 子’s just plain 子’s trying to tackle this massively hard thing with our little 子 brains.

My guess as a newbie is that 2,000 kanji probably takes more like two years even if you stay reasonably focused and bite off a manageable chunk of 10-20 lessons every day. And even doing that many lessons and the reviews means around an hour a day (at least?) spending on kanji. And for most people, that’s going to be hard to sustain for 12-24 months. I’m only 1 month in, so I’m still in the senpai ninja hero “in my mind” mode.

日本語は難しいです!

I think what you wrote improved my chances of success.
Humility and reasonable goals FTW!
Thank you 先生

bows

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I’m in. Hitting level 30 before 2023 feels like a potentially achievable goal for me, though was thinking more 2024 for hitting 60.

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Me too, I’m in this for a good 2 years I reckon :grin: 頑張りましょうー!

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I really appreciate your lovely reply, thank you! :cherry_blossom:

Haha yesss I was in such a similar boat when I started out. All starry-eyed and excited, I absolutely charged ahead with WK for many many months, and then when I fell off the wagon for whatever reason, I fell HARD and couldn’t get back on :sweat_smile:

The other thing I somewhat neglected was reinforcing the WK knowledge through actual consistent reading elsewhere. Sure, I read a few articles here and there on NHK Easy or similar, but I didn’t reeeally build a reading habit that stuck. This would have made the SRS the ‘icing on the cake’, rather than being the sole thing I relied on for memorisation. And some listening immersion also would have been a good shout! So those are things I’m going to make time for this time round :smiley:

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Genki is pretty good if you are starting out grammatically listening stuff in the workbook and a decent reading section.

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Let’s do it!!

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Thanks for the hot tip! I like seeing the other folks around my level. :smiley:

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yeah! welcome soapy. glad to be in this with you
*feeling squeaky clean

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yayay thanks! glad to be the official cleaner of the manly racers :relieved:

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I’m already at level 22 for the 4th time, *ahem* but knowing my tendencies of dropping japanese studies for months on end with then resetting and whatnot a goal of getting to at least level 30 in 2022 while pursuing a degree and having a fulltime job is a good and reasonable challenge it think.

どうぞよろしく

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