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Wed, 31 Jul 2024 21:13:32 GMT

It’s 21 months since I started. It took me a year to get through 27 levels, and now I’m only level 35 and I’ve been at this level for a month and probably have 2+ weeks to go. What happened? 🧵 https://bsky.app/profile/treyharris.bsky.social/post/3kylzqnscwk23

The 30’s levels really are aptly named 地獄 (“Hell”). So many kanji introduced here are variants of ones I had down cold early on, when I could rely on not needing to know semi-common kanji slightly different than super-common ones.
Assuming you don’t go freakishly fast, you’re now seeing Enlightened kanji to be burned on the regular (meaning you learned them at least 5.5 months ago). Because of the similarity cognitive interference just mentioned, a lot of these I get wrong. Some tumble all the way back down to Apprentice. Some of those stick around, bopping up to Mastered or Enlightened and getting knocked back. Like, I still have 20 items from lessons 1–5, not counting resurrections!
And yes: resurrections. There are kanji with shared readings that have collapsed into one in my head, distinctions I didn’t realize I needed to know, secondary meanings or readings I hadn’t paid attention to, etc. E.g.: I just resurrected 想 (そう sō, “imagine”) because I was confusing it with 総, 象 (particularly problematic, since both appear in 想像, そうぞう sōzō “imagination”) and it was messing me up my burning early words like 思想 (しぞう shizō “ideology”). So that adds to the load but doesn’t contribute to level progress.
From almost the start I used the excellent Double-Check userscript. I still use it—but now I know I initially used it wrong. I started because it sucked when things happened like a) I typo’d the romaji while correctly sounding out the word in my head, and b) from outside study, I had some meanings in my head that WaniKani didn’t present, and if I forgot to add them as custom alternatives I wanted to be able to fix that and not demote it. These were valid use cases, and still are.
But I wrongly used it. Like, when I thought I had a “brain fart”. Confusing しき and しょく (shiki and shoku, two alternate readings that often go together on the same kanji) and telling myself I’d remember next time and promoting it. This is a valid strategy for many topics spaced-repetition is good for, and is why Anki and other SRS apps basically always let you “grade yourself”. But Japanese readings are not one of those topics — “near enough” is okay for pitch accent, but not for readings. And the really bad way I used it was to let myself slide when I got transitivity of verbs wrong. There are only (“only”!) 350 or so “verb pairs” in Japanese, but distinguishing them is really important, because Japanese is a verb-based language! There are helpful patterns (all but 2 in -aru are mediopassive, all ending with -す are transitive). But there’s no way, except just memorizing, to know that for 届 (とど todo “deliver”), 届く (todoku) is “to be delivered” while 届ける (todokeru) is “to deliver”, and not the reverse.
It was a shortcut that, like shortcuts usually are, turned out to be worse in the long run. So now I still use Double-Check, but in almost exactly the opposite manner! I still let the typos and synonyms go, but now I’m merciless in marking my “correct” answer wrong if it accepts, say, “to hurt” and I was thinking in my head “to hurt someone” and it’s “to feel hurt”. Or like when I discovered I thought 供給 (きょうきゅう kyōkyū) and 納入 (のうにゅう nōnyū) were synonyms because WK accepted “supply” for both—but 供給, is, like, art “supplies”, and 納入 is like the law of “supply” and demand. If I get it “right” but was thinking it wrongly, I now mark it wrong. I started this around January when I realized my problem, and it initially slowed my progress, but it’s been paying dividends since.
Finally, I used the Vacation Mode feature very badly. Due to Covid I hadn’t been offline for more than 24 hours until a 9-day cruise vacation this March. I was going on vacation, right, so I set Vacation Mode, obvs. Right? Wrong.

It should really be called “pause” and auto-expire after a short period (maybe 48 hours max). Because it essentially “freezes time” as if those 9 days never happened. So when I deactivated it, I had broken the entire premise of spaced-repetition!

Let me explain: for items that were in Enlightened (4-month return period), 9 extra days is not a huge difference, but anything below Master I essentially had falsely promoted to at least Guru II — “spaced”, but without the benefit of the “repetition” of seeing the items!

My correct-answer rate plummeted. And it was insane how long this effect lasted. My rule of thumb for learning new items was a) no more than 15-item lessons a day, b) keep it to less than 100 items below Guru level, c) my review forecast should be around 100 per day.

It took me six weeks to get back to doing lessons using this rule, and 2.5 months to finish the level I’d started just before going on vacation! It was a disastrous setback — and much of it could have been avoided, by just not using Vacation Mode.

The idea behind Vacation Mode seems sensible: coming back from vacation, just to see 350 items in your queue, would be a huge bummer. Vacation Mode means if you had a day coming up with 100 reviews, you’ll come back to a day with those same 100 reviews.

But when I have a normal load, I can finish 2 reviews a minute. 350 items looks dispiriting — but it’s only three hours or less, even accounting for more wrong answers. If I had done that, I would have knocked a fair number of Guru I/Guru II items back into Apprentice and it would have taken a week or so te clear them. But that would have been vastly better than what happened by enabling Vacation Mode. It’s only now that things are feeling back to normal.

And not coincidentally, it’s the same period of time it took my first new items from after my vacation to be Burned. So I think WaniKani errs in describing Vacation Mode as for “prolonged” periods away. It should be used for short periods only — and maybe not at all.

Sorry for the super-long thread, but I hope some WaniKani users — or people considering it — it find it interesting and/or useful. #WaniKani #日本語 #日本語学学習

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 21:11:03 GMT

The 30’s levels really are aptly named 地獄 (“Hell”). So many kanji introduced here are variants of ones I had down cold early on, when I could rely on not needing to know semi-common kanji slightly different than super-common ones.
Assuming you don’t go freakishly fast, you’re now seeing Enlightened kanji to be burned on the regular (meaning you learned them at least 5.5 months ago). Because of the similarity cognitive interference just mentioned, a lot of these I get wrong. Some tumble all the way back down to Apprentice. Some of those stick around, bopping up to Mastered or Enlightened and getting knocked back. Like, I still have 20 items from lessons 1–5, not counting resurrections!
And yes: resurrections. There are kanji with shared readings that have collapsed into one in my head, distinctions I didn’t realize I needed to know, secondary meanings or readings I hadn’t paid attention to, etc. E.g.: I just resurrected 想 (そう sō, “imagine”) because I was confusing it with 総, 象 (particularly problematic, since both appear in 想像, そうぞう sōzō “imagination”) and it was messing me up my burning early words like 思想 (しぞう shizō “ideology”). So that adds to the load but doesn’t contribute to level progress.
From almost the start I used the excellent Double-Check userscript. I still use it—but now I know I initially used it wrong. I started because it sucked when things happened like a) I typo’d the romaji while correctly sounding out the word in my head, and b) from outside study, I had some meanings in my head that WaniKani didn’t present, and if I forgot to add them as custom alternatives I wanted to be able to fix that and not demote it. These were valid use cases, and still are.
But I wrongly used it. Like, when I thought I had a “brain fart”. Confusing しき and しょく (shiki and shoku, two alternate readings that often go together on the same kanji) and telling myself I’d remember next time and promoting it. This is a valid strategy for many topics spaced-repetition is good for, and is why Anki and other SRS apps basically always let you “grade yourself”. But Japanese readings are not one of those topics — “near enough” is okay for pitch accent, but not for readings. And the really bad way I used it was to let myself slide when I got transitivity of verbs wrong. There are only (“only”!) 350 or so “verb pairs” in Japanese, but distinguishing them is really important, because Japanese is a verb-based language! There are helpful patterns (all but 2 in -aru are mediopassive, all ending with -す are transitive). But there’s no way, except just memorizing, to know that for 届 (とど todo “deliver”), 届く (todoku) is “to be delivered” while 届ける (todokeru) is “to deliver”, and not the reverse.
It was a shortcut that, like shortcuts usually are, turned out to be worse in the long run. So now I still use Double-Check, but in almost exactly the opposite manner! I still let the typos and synonyms go, but now I’m merciless in marking my “correct” answer wrong if it accepts, say, “to hurt” and I was thinking in my head “to hurt someone” and it’s “to feel hurt”. Or like when I discovered I thought 供給 (きょうきゅう kyōkyū) and 納入 (のうにゅう nōnyū) were synonyms because WK accepted “supply” for both—but 供給, is, like, art “supplies”, and 納入 is like the law of “supply” and demand. If I get it “right” but was thinking it wrongly, I now mark it wrong. I started this around January when I realized my problem, and it initially slowed my progress, but it’s been paying dividends since.
Finally, I used the Vacation Mode feature very badly. Due to Covid I hadn’t been offline for more than 24 hours until a 9-day cruise vacation this March. I was going on vacation, right, so I set Vacation Mode, obvs. Right? Wrong.

Sorry for the super-long thread, but I hope some WaniKani users — or people considering it — it find it interesting and/or useful. #WaniKani #日本語 #日本語学学習

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 21:10:57 GMT

The 30’s levels really are aptly named 地獄 (“Hell”). So many kanji introduced here are variants of ones I had down cold early on, when I could rely on not needing to know semi-common kanji slightly different than super-common ones.
Assuming you don’t go freakishly fast, you’re now seeing Enlightened kanji to be burned on the regular (meaning you learned them at least 5.5 months ago). Because of the similarity cognitive interference just mentioned, a lot of these I get wrong. Some tumble all the way back down to Apprentice. Some of those stick around, bopping up to Mastered or Enlightened and getting knocked back. Like, I still have 20 items from lessons 1–5, not counting resurrections!
And yes: resurrections. There are kanji with shared readings that have collapsed into one in my head, distinctions I didn’t realize I needed to know, secondary meanings or readings I hadn’t paid attention to, etc. E.g.: I just resurrected 想 (そう sō, “imagine”) because I was confusing it with 総, 象 (particularly problematic, since both appear in 想像, そうぞう sōzō “imagination”) and it was messing me up my burning early words like 思想 (しぞう shizō “ideology”). So that adds to the load but doesn’t contribute to level progress.
From almost the start I used the excellent Double-Check userscript. I still use it—but now I know I initially used it wrong. I started because it sucked when things happened like a) I typo’d the romaji while correctly sounding out the word in my head, and b) from outside study, I had some meanings in my head that WaniKani didn’t present, and if I forgot to add them as custom alternatives I wanted to be able to fix that and not demote it. These were valid use cases, and still are.
But I wrongly used it. Like, when I thought I had a “brain fart”. Confusing しき and しょく (shiki and shoku, two alternate readings that often go together on the same kanji) and telling myself I’d remember next time and promoting it. This is a valid strategy for many topics spaced-repetition is good for, and is why Anki and other SRS apps basically always let you “grade yourself”. But Japanese readings are not one of those topics — “near enough” is okay for pitch accent, but not for readings. And the really bad way I used it was to let myself slide when I got transitivity of verbs wrong. There are only (“only”!) 350 or so “verb pairs” in Japanese, but distinguishing them is really important, because Japanese is a verb-based language! There are helpful patterns (all but 2 in -aru are mediopassive, all ending with -す are transitive). But there’s no way, except just memorizing, to know that for 届 (とど todo “deliver”), 届く (todoku) is “to be delivered” while 届ける (todokeru) is “to deliver”, and not the reverse.
It was a shortcut that, like shortcuts usually are, turned out to be worse in the long run. So now I still use Double-Check, but in almost exactly the opposite manner! I still let the typos and synonyms go, but now I’m merciless in marking my “correct” answer wrong if it accepts, say, “to hurt” and I was thinking in my head “to hurt someone” and it’s “to feel hurt”. Or like when I discovered I thought 供給 (きょうきゅう kyōkyū) and 納入 (のうにゅう nōnyū) were synonyms because WK accepted “supply” for both—but 供給, is, like, art “supplies”, and 納入 is like the law of “supply” and demand. If I get it “right” but was thinking it wrongly, I now mark it wrong. I started this around January when I realized my problem, and it initially slowed my progress, but it’s been paying dividends since.
Finally, I used the Vacation Mode feature very badly. Due to Covid I hadn’t been offline for more than 24 hours until a 9-day cruise vacation this March. I was going on vacation, right, so I set Vacation Mode, obvs. Right? Wrong.

Sorry for the super-long thread, but I hope some WaniKani users — or people considering it — it find it interesting and/or useful. #WaniKani #日本語 #日本語学学習