Five months ago, I started a Japanese vocab and kanji learning program through a website called WaniKani. My brother Tim had been using it for almost a year prior to that, and I wish he had forced me to start using it then. Granted, I didn’t know I was going to Japan quite at that point, but it would be so nice to be nearly done with the program by now!

I have been trying to advance through the levels as quickly as possible to maximize my exposure to words and characters while I am actually still living in Japan. It started slow, but quickly got quite time consuming. I kept at it, though, and have been pleasantly surprised how many kanji I am recognizing now out in the wild.

Over the course of my travels during the summer, I started to get a bit behind in the program, though. I didn’t want to slow down my leveling, so I have been selectively holding off on learning new vocab, since that is not required for the levels. Now that I am done traveling for a while, I got somewhat caught up on work, and now am trying to catch up on vocab.

I caved this past weekend and spent many hours getting through my “lessons queue”, which had 600 items in it at that point. Now I am paying the price with my reviews queue, though, which a day later was at 600, and is down to 300 now… and I forgot most of the words with exception readings. Which is basically what I expected… I figured getting them in the reviews queue would force me to get exposed to them, at least, even if I get them wrong many times at first.

Here’s to hoping I can improve my memorization!