With Extra Study you can practice your Recent Lessons, Recent Mistakes and Burned Items with the same quiz interface. Unlike Reviews, in Extra Study your mistakes don’t count. You can practice them as much (or as little) as you want. Extra Study is completely optional!

WaniKani will keep track of your Extra Study progress. Feel free to close it partway through, and when you open it again you’ll be able to continue your remaining unfinished items. After you complete all items in a category, they’ll re-randomize and become available again. Currently, there’s no way to reset your progress manually.

The numercial counts for Recent Lessons and Burned Items on the Extra Study widget show you how many items you have left before the quiz turns over and starts again from the beginning. For instance, if your count says “5 of 10,” and you do one item, the count will go down to “4 of 10.” The count for Recent Mistakes is simply the number of mistakes you made in the last twenty-four hours.

Keep in mind that new items may get added or removed as you do reviews and lessons. For example, if you do new lessons, items will be added to the Recent Lessons, and when you guru an item it will be removed.

Besides the default Extra Study widget, each variant can be added as its own widget when you’re customizing the dashboard.

Recent Lessons

Use Extra Study’s Recent Lessons mode if you’ve just finished doing a set of lessons and want to quiz yourself to make sure you’ve learned them. You can also use it if you’ve been having trouble with new lessons in Reviews. Studying Recent Lessons during your free time will help improve your memory and give you a better chance of success in your upcoming reviews.

What’s Considered a Recent Lesson?

Any item you’ve learned in Lessons and haven’t guru’d in Reviews will be part of Recent Lessons mode. Once you complete your reviews and the item moves to the guru stage, this will no longer remain in Recent Lessons.

A recent lesson can be a recent mistake too.

Recent Mistakes

Use Extra Study’s Recent Mistakes mode to practice mistakes you made in a Reviews session. You don’t have to wait for that item you got wrong to be available again in Reviews.

What’s Considered a Recent Mistake?

Any item you’ve made a mistake on within the last twenty-four hours will be part of this mode. However, in those twenty-four hours, if you get that item correct in Reviews, it will be removed from Recent Mistakes at that time.

Both Recent Lessons and Recent Mistakes are there to help you succeed in Reviews. Use them as much as you’d like, but only if you have the time for it. It’s called Extra Study for a reason, so don’t worry if you can’t get to them either.

The Recent Mistakes widget also has an Item List and a Flashcard variant that you can add to your dashboard. Learn more about these variants here.

Burned Items

Use Extra Study’s Burned Items mode to practice items you have already burned. We know that learning kanji (and Japanese) is a long-term endeavor. If you’re not studying outside of WaniKani, you may not see the items you’ve burned as regularly as you might like. Although burned items are supposed to be “burned into your memory,” it’s not impossible to forget them. So when you have some extra time, jump into your Burned Items queue in Extra Study to review as many—or as few—burned items as you’d like.

What’s Considered a Burned Item?

A burned item is simply an item you have reviewed correctly through all the SRS levels and will no longer appear in your Reviews queue. If you feel you don’t know the item well enough while doing Extra Study, you can always resurrect it on the item’s page, and it will return to apprentice level. This means the item will also leave the Extra Study queue.