I’m just under 2 years in and hit level 60 a month or so ago. Since then, without the new lessons, I thought my life would be easier and it is to some extent. However, my review scores are so low now it’s ridiculous!! I’m still averaging just over 90% accuracy in total which I’m keen to maintain - however since 60 my individual scores were generally mid 70s and now heading steadily down to 55-65%. I’m not sure why this is other than there aren’t any recent lessons, and thus fresh in my mind kanji, to bump up my score. Is this the only reason? My burns are slowly going up (nearly 5000 which I’d like to hit) and I think the other categories are generally going up but Apprentice is hovering between 85 and 105 suggesting that as I see an old kanji and get it wrong it’s replacing something more recent I moved up. I’d love to get Apprentice to 0 before I finish but getting things like 箸 wrong is not going to get me there.
I’m done at the end of January and don’t want to give up before then and WK must still be doing me some good but it doesn’t feel like it anymore. Any thoughts or ideas?
The words you review most are those at a low SRS level. Its pretty much what you said: before you had recently learned material and old material you did bad at which averaged to a decent score. Now you dont have that recently learned material and the words at a low srs level are only the words you dont know very well.
I would suggest the leech reviewing script (I can try and find the link for you, but dont have it anymore since I upgraded to win 10). Apart from that, just taking extra time to relearn mnemonics so its like those words were freshly learned. For some words, you really cant just brute force srs them and need to go back and have a solid mnemonic. I needed that for 就職、職業、and 就業.
Well, not only fresh kanji, but stuff you had no problem with are getting higher up (or burned) and thus are les frequent.
I think you should have a good look at the items you got back in apprentice, and go over their lesson again. The WKstat website is nice to see at a glance the problematic items, then just sit down and get studying, I guess
Good luck!
(I’ve also been experiencing a dip in accuracy, by the way)
Forgot to add this in my post, but I have experienced this as well! You’re not alone, and I would go as far as to say you are very likely in the majority.
I’m only level 8 so take this with a grain of salt, but I think forgetting some items is a natural part of the SRS process, especially with a huge deck like wanikani. However since you’re so eager to start burning items (I would be too), here’s some ideas to give yourself a boost:
get lots of input outside wanikani reviews. The best way to make a kanji or vocab stick is to encounter it in the wild doing something that interests you
do self study sessions for guru items that will be due for review soon. Maybe some people would call this cheating (I wouldn’t, studying is studying), but doing this will surely improve your review accuracy.
Thanks for the ideas and rationale folks. I have been using the leech website throughout my WK studies and I do go back to lessons after every review and take notes on troublesome items. I guess, as said, the ones left are “harder” and now represent a bigger portion of the active (ie non-burned) items and therefore, as also said, this is a natural part of the SRS process. I do intend to read more now lessons are out of the way but the current situation is getting me down and so my motivation to do anything has dropped.
I feel like, more now than ever, I’m being forced to confront all the words I never truly became comfortable with, and that’s making things more challenging. As @Vanilla said, you’re probably far from alone in experiencing this issue.
Same here. Yesterday I failed to burn 7 items out of 8. It was an odd case of course, but you get the point. It happens quite frequently.
What has been helping me a lot is adding these leeches to a new SRS system. I just start them from the very beginning: lessons, 4h, 8h and so on.
So far I’ve got some of those items up to Enlightment on this other SRS system and it has been working wonderful. I no longer feel as insecure with them as before.
That’s not a bad idea although I feel I’d be adding many items daily. I’m moving over to Flashcards Deluxe as soon as I’m done with WK and have KKLC kanji, 10k vocab and 10k sentence decks made. A 100 (aherm!) leech deck would be a nice idea to get going with.
I think that’s exactly right and to be expected. The SRS process has filtered all the easy ones through to burned, and now you only have the harder ones for you left to repeat, repeat, repeat until they are easy.
Oh, sure. I don’t add these lessons on top of my daily lessons. Instead of doing new items, I take a day off for leeches once in a while. Something like that.
Just to add to the chorus of others here. As I am approaching burning everything, I’m facing the same items I struggled to burn since level 50 or so. That concentration of items coupled with me not having daily reviews and not encountering those items in real life causes me fail them when they are up to be burned. The good news is that I usually recognize one part (the reading or meaning), and it’s not the “what in the world is this thing?!” feeling that I’ve had when facing items I didn’t properly learn from the lessons. Of course, consequently, my accuracy has gone down.
Just out of curiosity: Who else still has an enormous amount of WK items unburnt even 174 days¹ (or more) after doing the last level 60 lesson²?
¹ as far as I know, it takes 174 days for an item to go from lesson to burnt
² ignoring the negligible amount of new lessons after the content overhaul
I have stopped doing reviews after reaching level 60
I am below level 60 but want to participate in the poll
0voters
I still have 2282 items left to burn after 176 days and my accuracy dropped to ≈ 60% now that the SRS found my weaknesses. The SRS can be quite sadistic.
More interesting info and it’s good to know that it’s not just me! One thing I am still puzzled about though. If, for instance, I was close to burning an item but I’ve forgotten it it’s not going to drop to Apprentice immediately. That means then that the ones that are dropping are relatively recent lesson items (say level 55+) or longer term issues. Any long term leech will still potentially be Apprentice. I’m not sure of the makeup of the 85-105 apprentice items ie is it the same 20 over 85 that keep dropping back in or is it a completely different 20 - I suspect the latter.
I have 3882 items left to burn after 42 days on Lv 60.
For me, it feels like a considerable amount of my 2282 items keeps rotating through apprentice - guru - master and maybe enlightened, so the items in apprentice always change.
Currently I have only 10 apprentice items which originate from a range of levels between 30 and 54. I also have not once managed to get my apprentice count to zero.
You could use the reorder script and exclude guru items from your reviews, so that nothing from guru can drop back down to apprentice
(I don’t know if the reorder script even provides such a feature)
Speaking personally… I’ve always struggled with leeches and they just piled up to an excessive amount after Level 60. Also, because I took so long to get to 60, I forgot lots of material along the way, so I’ve been un-burning kanji level-by-level, so even after transitioning after a year, I have just under 2k un-burned items. In the process of doing this, I found the items fall into three categories:
Kanji that are fairly easy to re-burn.
Kanji that look very similar to other kanji and seemingly have become difficult to burn on the second attempt.
Kanji that were never burned in the first place that continue to vex me.
I think WK’s biggest weakness is an effective way to deal with leeches and lack of handling of similar items. I’ve added scripts in for both of these, but it was really too little too late and forced this all to take far too much time.
Since I’m a lifetime subscriber, I really have the freedom to continue to use WK daily and work on my weaknesses. On the other hand, another strategy could be to pack things up and move onto trying to use what I know more in the real-world, but motivation to do other study comes and goes.
Some nice looking stats there. I never really considered staying after Lv60 and wondered how long it would take to burn all but 2.5 years is a long time and a huge extra commitment! I’ve set up some decks in Anki and in Flashcards Deluxe now and intend to use them for KKLC (which I’ve been using the mnemonics from), Core 6k Vocab and Core 10k Sentences. I’ll take it far easier than WK and do some reading/listening/grammar (Bunpro).
I’m getting closer and closer to level 60 and already can feel the effect. Half of my reviews are about items I keep getting wrong and it’s getting very taxing. Will my dear WK just become a poisonous pool of deadly leeches ?
