Why do some people discourage resetting?

WaniKani
22

Well, to put things in perspective, WK has 9087 items in it. 2000 reviews is fully 22% of the content on the entire site. If many of those items have been completely forgotten, then that would be like trying to learn literally hundreds of words/kanji all at once (compared to learning them the normal way through the levels, where the lessons become available to you gradually, forcing you to stagger them).

The way the SRS is set up, it’s designed around the assumption that you will be able to clear out your reviews and get them down to zero on a constant basis. The first two apprentice stages come back 4 hours later and then 8 hours later. If you have a huge pile of reviews, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to get to those reviews in time. The longer you wait on them, the worse your accuracy will get. If you fail a higher level review, it goes back to guru. Fail a guru review, it goes back to apprentice. (For an illustration of why accuracy matters so much in terms of reducing your overall workload, see this simulation).

For most people, the apprentice items make up the majority of their daily review churn. For people working through a huge backlog, they’ll gain more and more guru and then apprentice reviews as they fail reviews on the master and enlightened items, which adds more and more clutter to the pile. Without having a way to sort through the pile so that you can knock out those lower level apprentice reviews when they come due, you’ll be at a severe disadvantage, and you could literally do reviews every day and still see zero progress in terms of overall numbers.

Which is why many people recommend using a reorder script to reorder your reviews so that lower SRS levels float to the top so that you can get those done, first, and push them up to higher levels. If you do this, you might have hundreds upon hundreds of enlightened items that you don’t even see for weeks because they’re basically locked out by the script until you’ve cleared out the lower level stuff.

Essentially, this recreates the vanilla WK system by artificially limiting the amount of items you’re reviewing at one time, so that you have time to properly learn that set of information before adding new stuff. Trying to learn too much at once means you can’t effectively practice everything, which means it’s a lot harder to properly learn it, and you need to spend more time with it, which is vastly less efficient in the long run.

Also, if someone doesn’t study at all for a year, pretty much all of your existing apprentice reviews have been completely forgotten, and the guru reviews, too. Probably many of the master level items as well, since it has been a lot longer than a month since you’ve seen those items. Even the enlightened items will probably be tricky, because a year is a lot longer than four months. Many people in that situation would be better off just relearning from scratch all the levels where all items are at master and below (at bare minimum). If you have to relearn it anyway, might as well do it through the gated level system instead of trying to do it with zero gates (using vanilla review order), or trying to recreate the gates (using a reorder script).

For an example of how a review pile can actually take you longer to get through than resetting, one user has been trying to get through a pile that is thousands upon thousands of reviews. This user reset to level 47 (from 60) in June 2021, and had 5288 reviews. Cross-referencing with my own study log, I was level 11 at the time. Over the year and a half or so since then, that user is still level 47, and I have made it to level 51.

So I have actually managed to outpace them by four levels, despite being so behind when they started working through their review pile, and I’ll likely achieve level 60 well before they reach it again (assuming I don’t fall off the wagon myself, haha). Obviously, the pace of the individual factors into this a lot, and I do in fact do more reviews daily than that user, but I’m by no means a speedrunner! Review piles are just really, really hard to work through, and it can be incredibly demoralizing to do so.

For the record, I’ve never had a review backlog myself, but I’ve read many, many accounts of others on this forum trying to get through a large review pile, and that has been enough to scare me into never wanting to go through that experience :sweat_smile:.

8 Likes
23

That’s really interesting, I had never thought about reset from the perspective of speed before, but it makes sense that resetting isn’t necessarily slower.

1 Like
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Depends on how dire things are. A few hundred? Maybe you can get it sorted out in a week or two? Over a thousand? Probably gonna take you a long time but resetting will push you back more time wise. It really depends on the situation. For me, I was rushing WK to the point I didn’t even recognize half of my reviews. So I was better served learning everything again. If that’s not yur situation maybe resting isn’t necessary.

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ヤバー！I already responded to this thread 5 months ago. 最悪。。。

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I actually reset to level 46, not 47. It took me over a year to get back up to 47 thanks to having to whittle down the massive review pile, and I’ll hit 48 any day now.

Also as far as “outpacing me” goes, it’s worth nothing that I went from level 1 to 60 in only 353 days on my first time through WK. It’s not that hard as long as you’re willing to just power through the reviews. But that doesn’t mean you’re actually learning anything.

At this point, I could just burn through my review pile and speedrun back up to 60 if I wanted to, but I don’t.

5 Likes
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My apologies for misremembering! When I went back to check, I only scrolled as far as your reset to 47 and forgot that there was another one :sweat_smile:.

And yeah, you definitely outpaced me when you went through WK the first time! Someone faster than me could have gotten all the way from 1 to 60 in the time you spent working on 46 to 47 over the past year, but as you said, rushing isn’t usually the best choice.

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That makes sense, unfortunately it’s just a side effect of wanikani’s SRS implementation being so strict and limited.

With user scripts and third party apps you can tackle a mountain of reviews by doing them in a sensible order, something the default website won’t let you do.

Resetting is just a workaround because of this limitation but it’s inefficient because you’ll lose progress on items you actually know, wasting time you could use on learning new things, and you have to adhere to the strict review schedule without any way to mark entries as “known” to speed the process (another silly limitation IMO).

So I’ll die on this hill and recommend looking into user scripts and third party apps before pressing the nuclear reset button.

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I got up to level 19 and during a period that had me slammed both at work and in my personal time, WaniKani was neglected until I had a couple hundred Lessons stacked up next to a few THOUSAND Reviews. I was forgetting the simplest things and was beside myself. I burned down the entire house and started back at ZERO. This time, I have been taking notes in a Word document that is at 792 pages and I am only up to Level 13 at the moment. The notes include all of the example sentences and usage examples. Retention is much higher, recall is much closer to automatic and my stats are around 98%. Couldn’t be happier. Daily practice, several times a day also seems to be helping quite a bit.

The new Practice sections are a great new addition. I also noticed today that you can “Resurrect” words from the Burn category after they have been retired. I’m assuming this puts them back into the review cycle. Pretty interesting.

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