2 month of vacation, should I increase the lessons pace?

Bunpro
#1

Hello everyone, (sorry in advance for any mistake I will make here : English is not my main language)

As a student in France (and I believe in most countries), I just got two months of vacation after finishing my year.
I’m currently going at the standard pace : 2 lessons + 10 vocab a day. But, as I have more time right now and I reeeally want to know more vocabulary to be able to immerse in content that I really like (not just Graded Readers : it’s really hard for me to immerse right now because I’m not liking what I am able to immerse with while still being comprehensible input), I was wondering if I should temporary increase the pace to 4 lessons + 20 vocab a day during those two months. However, I’m a little worried about the reviews that I will get after those 2 months because I will have less time to tackle them. Is it a good idea to do that? How many reviews will I get after 2 months for those going at this pace ? Will I be “punished” a few month after with 100 reviews on a random day ? If I go back to a normal pace 2 weeks before going back to university or if I stop completely for 1 week will it be enough to not get overwhelmed by reviews when work start again?

Thanks in advance.

1 Like
#2

Personally, I wouldn’t recommend it - unless that pace would technically be sustainable while you’re in school and you’re just choosing to have a lighter load, in my opinion it will quickly come back to punish you once you have less time.

My feelings about Japanese and learning almost any language is that sustainability is key - the worst case scenario would be you feel so overwhelmed you become demotivated and no longer want to continue studying. The best case scenario would be an earlier introduction to content you will eventually reach if you keep your current pace.

I would recommend you take this extra time and engage with more production activities like writing or speaking (even if just to yourself) which in my experience are harder to do when I’m bogged down by life

#3

You can always set your own pace. For example, I have a daily goal of 6 grammar terms in chunks of 3. So I may do 0, 3, 6, or 9 grammar terms a day depending on the day. On days where I have more time, I’ll do 9 (rare), on days where I have no time, I do 0 (rare). So set your daily goal to something like 6 but go for at least 2-4 a day. You can probably do a similar thing for vocab. At minimum, try to do your reviews even if you cannot do any new grammar/vocab.

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#4

Yes, you would most likely be getting 100+ reviews with that pace, but you don’t have to do them all on the same day.

Just do whatever feels a comfortable amount to you on each day, but here are a few tricks to handle too many reviews:

Deactivate ghost creation. Create ghost manually if you feel the need to, but use it sparsly. Activate “show srs level” and sort reviews by SRS level lowest to highest and do all your beginner items first. This ensures that you get shorter repetition on newly learned items. When the first adept item pops up, switch to random order, this will help preventing higher SRS vocab to gather on the same day (those random high review days). After you finished your beginner items, just do as many reviews as you feel comfortable with. Sure, you might see you have 300+ reviews for a few days, but you really don’t have to do them the same day. Just be smart about it.

If you are the type who cannot ignore the high review count, this might stress you out, though. This is something only you know.

In the end, the gain of doing a few points more a day for 2 months is not too big and you might profit more if you just relax for 2 months :sweat_smile: vacations are there for a purpose and school/university is always a lot of work where a vacation is really needed.

1 Like
#5

Whenever I am expecting to have an extended amount of spare time to study, I increase my reviews. The important thing is to only increase them for the first half of your break, not the entire time. I usually pile on lots cards at the very start of a break and then spend the rest of my time working through them. This way, I have returned to a normal amount of work by the time my break is over.

Depends on your accuracy. If you get all your reviews correct at the same time, then yes. I’m not particularly accurate because I’m focused on my recognition speed, so I’ve never gotten a huge amount of reviews in one batch.