I’m at a real loss here. I came back after over a years break from wanikani and tried to do some old reviews I had waiting for me. After 30 reviews where I got over 50% wrong, I now have no idea whether I need to do a full reset. On the one hand I haven’t stopped my language learning and imagine I still remember many of the over 6000 burned items I have. On the other, I clearly have forgotten many of the kanji, enough that trying to do these reviews was an extremely slow process. I also know that if I try to do a full reset and then speed through the lessons as I know many of the kanji already, I’ll quickly get bogged down in huge review queues. Any tips on how best to approach this?
One of the functions of SRS is that if you get a review wrong, it’ll come up again sooner to give you the opportunity to re-learn it. Stop doing lessons, take your reviews a bit at a time, and eventually you’ll be back on top of things again.
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In stressful situations, it can be easy to think all or nothing. If you’re considering doing a reset, I’d highly recommend at least don’t do a full reset. It’s possible to choose your level.
Use wkstats (specifically the page with items, wanikani, sorted by level) for an overview to look at each level. At which level do you start to feel resistance? Don’t reset lower than that.
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First I’d advise to not panic, assess properly where you are standing, and then ask again here in this very thread.
A reset should be a last resort because it’s unrecoverable once done.
Using [Userscript] Wanikani Item Inspector you can self study every item (especially the burned ones) and note which ones you pass and and which ones you fail.
Then taking into account what items you have forgotten (especially the burned ones) you can resurrect on a case by case basis.
Do you want to do only kanji ?
Or also vocab ?
Do you use other services and or read or practice elsewhere ?
Did you forget because you didn’t do Japanese at all or because you did not encounter those items in the wild ?
A lot of things will impact the choice that is right for you.
You may just be cold because of the lack of practice and it’ll come back running once you’ve warmed up.
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Thanks everyone, I appreciate the advice. I’ll work my way through my existing reviews and see how I feel after I complete those. My concern is that many of my burned items should also be reset but even the thought of sifting through 6000 vocab/kanji to decide which ones should be reset seems like a daunting task. I wish there were a way for me to get served like 30 burned items a day to ‘retest’, any I get wrong go back to guru and ones I get right remain burned. That would keep things manageable.
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The userscript I linked allows to do exactly that, you just have to ask it nicely.
Creating a custom filter (here burned lvl 1 kanji)
Select it
Then start a quizz on shown items
Boom you’re done.
You can manualy edit the filter to go level by level as needed
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If it were me, I personally wouldn’t bother. I probably have lots of items burned years ago that I’m still looking up when I encounter them in the wild. And that’s no problem. I’d rather look up a word every now and then in the dictionary after I encounter them for real, than having to sift through a bunch of reviews and use time on that. It’d be super demotivating for me at least.
(I have a different routine when it comes to reviewing vocab now that I’m done with WK. I add vocab on jpdb when I come across words/expressions I want to review)
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I reccomend panicking for a few minutes, scream a whole lot for sure. Then as the police are taking you in for mistaking your screaming as yet another one of your victims, you’ll have plenty of time to think calmly about what you can do.
Since you’ve still done studying for that year, I think that restarting is a bit too big of a move. Just do your current reviews and suffer through them until you begin passing again. Maybe use an Aniki deck that’s focused on kanji and vocabulary that shows up in WaniKani to make sure you know all the previous stuff.
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This is perfect, thanks for helping me make sense of this script (it’s a little overwhelming at first glance). I like that it just tells me if I’m right or wrong and doesn’t keep testing me till I get the answer right as that’ll make the process much faster.
Two questions if that’s okay -
1. Is there a way to do a follow up test on just the items I get wrong? I can’t see any way to access the results of the self-study quiz after closing the window.
2. Is there a way to quickly unburn items that I get wrong in the test? It looks at the moment like I’d have to go to each individual items page, scroll to the bottom and unburn it.
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Hello
Glad to see you’ve a better way to handle the mountain :).
I do not know for those questions.
I used the same process to test myself after a year to see what i did forget.
I just copy pasted the wrong kanjis of the session summary in a text note and then unburned my items one by one.
In a similar situation, but with a much longer break. A reset is tempting, and it honestly might not even be terrible for me, but the ‘right’ answer is to work through the reviews. If it’s wrong, so be it, it’s going to go back into the rotation. If they are all wrong, oh well. Probably still better than erasing all progress.
100%, after a week back into it now I’ve realised a couple of important things about the reviews I had sitting waiting. Firstly - leeches. Many of the items in my review queue were and still are leeches that I hadn’t seen in so long I’d forgotten that’s what they were. Secondly - SRS items, the whole design is that you remember items by seeing them after the correct amount of time has passed, by going many months or years beyond the recommended time it’s natural to have forgotten them. Thirdly - new items, if it was a kanji or vocab I’d only just learned anyway, of course I won’t have remembered them.
Or to put more simply, getting anything above 0% correct when you come back from a long break is abnormal and should be celebrated.
As for the burned items, I’m slowly and methodically going through them now at a pace that I can keep on top of. Ones I’ve forgotten I’m unburning to practise. If after a review or two I feel confident I don’t need to do the whole SRS to completion, I reburn them to keep the load to a minimum. I won’t do any new lessons until I’ve made it through all of my burned items.
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Sounds sensible, and I think it’s exactly the same approach I’ll be taking. I had to step away and resist the urge to reset, because I knew it would be a mistake, but when you are looking at the screen and just overwhelmed it feels like the right choice.