What do you do on days when you feel brain fried from WK

I don’t mind the mistakes I make on my reviews.
I think they’re a big part of learning in general, and judge my progress on how many words are left in my reviews instead of accuracy.
Of course it’s frustrating when you get wrong 5+ words in a row, but if you can make your review pile reach zero… You’ve become better than you were before clicking that “review” button, and it’s all that matters after all !

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I do the reviews anyway. I prefer doing them badly to not doing them at all.

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Same. Consistency is key.

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i agree, I was like even if I get 0% Im just doing this #$&@ it.

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I usually only do SOME of my reviews and not all when that happens. Especially if I’m brain fried from my day. I either give up, or hope that later in the day or even the next day I’ll have a clearer head… Usually after a break and try later on, I’m b better. I still do my reviews every day, though.

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I don’t mind mistakes, but messing some items persistently can be annoying. I try to come up with better mnemonic, funny story, or write it down and review thru the day. Right now I keep failing on readings for 何日, and 毎月, so I might start singing songs about those two.

but actually…

Get some sunlight! Especially in wintertime.
People are often vitamin D deficient.

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Don’t take any days off until you hit level 53. Then take a bunch off.

Anyway, there’s never reason to be down about a missed answer on WK, especially if you do it regularly. That’s just the SRS doing its job, catching what you don’t know well yet and increasing its frequency in the queue until you do. You’re not here to beat WK, but to learn to read kanji fluenty. You should fear the burns that come too early rather than the ones you miss.

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Cute! :wink: you may still get used to 200+ reviews. but good that you decided to tackle the stack and had such high accuracy!
also, you don’t always need to get your reviews back to 0. just doing as many reviews as you can as often as you can is all you need to do to succeed with WK.

Sure, they look similar, so you have to make sure to remember their differences very well.
take a look at the mnemonics, or make your own mnemonic for the differences.

午 (noon) is slide + dry. imagine a dry slide in the noon sun at a children’s playground.

the cross for 牛 (cow) sticks out at the top, but not for 午.
remember the mnemonic for 牛: the cross goes through the gun (you use to shoot the cow), imagine it as the gun’s crosshair on top.

生 (life) has three horizontal lines, it’s a cow on the ground. a cow on the ground supports your life. or maybe the cow gives life to a calf which is now on the ground.

with that said, good luck unfrying brains and reviewing, everyone!

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I was there couple of weeks ago, repeatedly confusing cow and noon, so I’ve googled “wanikani cow” and got this topic:

Problem solved.

As for “life” kanji, it will get better as soon as you go thru bunch of vocab words with this kanji (hint “sensei” is one of them).

I think it is part of the fun, to train your brain to pick up small details like this.

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That’s super helpful thank you! I was whining to a friend immediately after that post who did some mandarin in college but can’t remember anything now. I screenshot my problem kanji and he told me “basically a cow has horns so if it has a horn it’s cow, if there’s no horn, it’s noon” and he blew my mind. I’ve never forgotten it since lmao. I love mnemonics because it really works for me but i’m not creative enough to make good ones for myself :frowning: I guess that’s the main struggle with remembering things. Like “ya” for arrow. I just have to remember the reading because I can’t think of a mnemonic that works for me.

200+ reviews omg no… I’m determined to keep within the “100 apprentice” tip and to squeeze in reviews as and when I can. The tsurakame app, while I originally felt stressed out about it, is now something I can’t imagine living without thanks to the notifications.

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Yes, I feel really good when I manage to get it right because I picked up the minor differences. Just a wee bit apprehensive because these are all still very simple kanji and there’s crazy complicated ones coming up. Practice makes perfect I guess :smiley:

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No, never. At least not so far.

Highest reviews I’ve had per day has only been about 325 so far though. I reckon it will go to 400+ in the future. Most days are somewhat between 120-200 for me.

I mostly am in the 85-95% correct range, which is my goal. (won’t go into detail but being 100% is also inefficient).

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I have 1400 reviews and 128 lessons to do. X.X

just curious how long did it take you to reach level 53?

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Like three years.

I level up on average once every two weeks, but there were two long breaks in there. With exceptions though, I clear out my reviews once a day and keep the apprentice queue around 100 items, which leads to the roughly two-week level-up pace.

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I think I have a similar pacing of 1-2 weeks to level up. I really dont understand how some are managing to hit level 60 in one year.

My method is like what most above have stated: taking a break and doing something else.

Sometimes I play Dark Souls 3 alongside my reviews. Everytime I die in the game I do 10 reviews.
In a similar vein, sometimes I do 10 reviews then read 2-3 pages in a book, then return to reviews, then back to the book, and so on (I like doing my reviews in nice batches of ten at a time).

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It’s possible if you time your days to hit multiple review sessions (strategizing to hit reviews as soon as they’re available, to expedite level-ups), and perhaps aren’t working in other aspects of study.

WK has just been one (consistently useful) part of my daily Japanese routine, so that pace was fine with me. It’s still one of the most efficient and effortless ways to learn to read kanji I’ve found, and even three years for the range of kanji it covers is a remarkably good pace in the grand-scheme of Japanese-learning.

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I try to force myself to do at least 10 reviews, usually once I do this amount I just kind of keep going. I respectfully disagree with the “always zero out” people, as right now I am working two jobs aka more than 50 hrs of work per week. Sometimes this means that it takes me 3 weeks or 4 weeks to level. It’s really hard because I know that if I dedicated full time to Wanikani I’d level really quickly. But - alas - that’s not possible in my life. However, I think breaking the pattern is worse than doing just a few reviews. Can’t cheat though - when I do have time - I try to get it to 0 again and stay there as long as I can.

Sometimes though, I find some other Japanese (still studying) thing to do - like write a blog post about my experience etc.

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