My apologies if you’ve mentioned it recently, I briefly skimmed through the most recent posts. Do you perhaps know why you end up keeping that mountain of reviews that high? Is it just that you don’t have the time to do it or is it psychological in that you can’t muster up the energy to do it?
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I think I see what you’re saying~
I think I’ve long abandoned the initial five minutes a day thing, but maybe something like five reviews a day, right or wrong may be the baby step I need.
One review a day is simply too small of a step, which, over more than one or two weeks, doesn’t seem to result in that much progress.
Here’s an example of how I thought it would work out:
Ex. In college i wanted to make a habit of going to the gym, and so in the beginning I literally just showed up for two minutes, and then afterwards I was free to leave. I did that for nearly six weeks and then on the seventh week, I thought, “I’m here I might as well do something here” and I started spending an hour at the gym each time I was there.
The showing up at the gym led to the one hour at the gym.
I wanted the bunpro one review a day to led to more time spent on bunpro but it doesn’t seem to be working that way.
I’ll try the three reviews a day thing and focus on the N4 deck for one week.
I think in these logs I’ll write a bit about what I learned about the grammar points and also emotions and that kinda thing.
Thank you and @Neon_Kitsune and everyone in this thread for your support!
I showed up at the gym today, which is the start of a streak ranging from last Wednesday. Here’s to coupling bunpro to post - lunch!
Also @EdBunpro the new review queue min and max look great and thank you for the change! I’ve already set it to three! However, on the Android app, the app says the max is 1000, and the minimum is 10. I’m guessing that the update will propagate to the app in due time, and I thought I’d let you know.
Initially a mountain of reviews is quite daunting to tackle, ex. Wanikani, and it’s preferable to keep it under a certain manageable level (maybe like 5 to 10 in my case atm).
I had tried for maybe a month or so this past September and it’s starting to appear to me that I was doing too little reviews per day to make a noticeable dent in the mountain. Perhaps it was an unsustainable pace even though it was only one review at least, or a couple at best. But this is starting to look like to me that I’m actually burnt out.
I’m going to try @EdBunpro 's suggestion of doing at least three reviews a day, I’ll try it for a week, focusing on the N5 and N4 decks, and see how I’m feeling then.
yeah unfortunately 1 review per day just wont cut it when you’ve got that big of a backlog. ghosts are the real issue as they stay come back incredibly quickly and require that you get them correct 4-5 times in a row to permanently get rid of them.
I too have quite a bit of experience with having massive review piles and in my case the psychological paralysis was a combination of the fear of getting everything incorrect and needing to spend a lot of time remembering the things I’d forgotten and then needing to do it all again when i got to the end of the review session only to get it wrong once again.
One thing that helped me tremendously was utilizing cram as a low stakes, low stress way to review things I might have already forgotten after an extended break. Personally I would cram one Bunpro Lesson at a time, starting from the things I had learned just before taking the extended break from reviews. At an average of around 15 items per lesson, the chunks are quite a bit bigger than what your stated goal is, but it has the advantage of clumping (somewhat) conceptually similar grammar points together. You could also just manually select the items to suit your needs.
If you by chance feel that part of your review paralysis could be due to similar reasons I’d recommend giving the cram option a little try. I barely did any reviews over the course of around 3-4 weeks as I was on vacation for two weeks and overindulging myself in my new PS5. I returned to 400 something reviews and just couldnt get back into the swing of things. I spent the next 2 weeks cramming a lesson at a time so that I could mentally prepare myself for tackling that mountain. It made a world of difference and I was able to knock them all out with only around 70 ghosts created.
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Yeah just play things by ear. Start with 3 a day for a few days and if you’re feeling good, try 5 for another couple days to re-evaluate how you’re doing. Inside the review settings you can set the ordering up to show ghosts or normal reviews first, etc. so maybe one of those settings will also be of benefit to you as you begin this shift in learning.
Re min/max: I’ve passed it along to the mobile dev, assuming no issues it should be available in the next update. Will have to manually stop after 3 yourself but not the end of the world!
Best of luck with anything, looking forward to seeing your progress and how things go.
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this thread kinda has me thinking of a review setting for situations like this. i think it would be cool if there was a “order by closeness to original due date or something”. Because if a card is at like SRS level 2, but hasnt been seen in a month (due to a high review backlog or something like this), the user is almost definitely gonna get it wrong. Same thing if something has an interval of 6 months but hasnt been seen in 2 years.
In my imaginged order, it would order the cards by something like “% overdue”. For every card, it would take how long its been since you have seen the card, and divide it by the interval of the card. For example, a card with an interval of 1 day that you havent seen in 2 would be 200% overdue, and a card that you havent seen in 3 months that has an interval of 2 months would be 150%. The reviews would be ordered by lowest percent overdue to highest.
I feel like that would be a good way to knock out a backlog because it puts the cards youre most likely to get right first. but also i have no clue about feasibility or anything so its just my 2 cents
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Ah yeah I know what you’re talking about, Anki has a similar sorting feature called ‘Relative Overdueness’ which is not exactly clear but I feel like is what you’re referring to. I’ve personally thought about it a bit in the past but I felt like it was a bit too niche of use-case and also not the easiest to not make confusing. Granted the idea didn’t get too far, but I also felt that this was only applicable to those with a really high backlog which may not be what the average user is going through.
Do you think the sorting by SRS feature to go from high to low does nearly the same task you’re referring to - knocking out ‘easier’ ones first? In my brain you’re likely to get the 10/12 SRS items correct rather than the 2/12, so having those appear first in reviews would help quickly go through the easier items to avoid burnout.
Curious to hear your thoughts! Either way, it’s something I’ll keep in mind going forward for sure when we’re discussing reviews and backlogs.
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upon further consideration, im pretty sure just doing higher level srs first would achieve most of the effect of the system in my last message in a far less confusing/convoluted way. the only time i see it not being as effective is if someone is trying to clear out a backlog while still adding new grammar points (for some god forsaken reason).
In a system where highest srs grammar would be shown during reviews first, im curious how ghost reviews would work.
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this is actually an interaction i’ve never attempted before, never crossed my mind. just did some testing though and here’s how it’s working:
if you have Review Category Sorting set to off and have the Sort by Progress set to Ascending, it will show you both normal reviews and ghost reviews at the same time from lowest to highest SRS. so basically SRS 2 is the same as Ghost 2 for the system, which is exactly how i would want it to work so i’m happy. for the inverse though with highest grammar, it would go from 12, 11, 10, etc. until (ghost) 4 was the highest number.
should be working as intended! although if you (or anyone else) plays around with it and notices something funky please shoot me a message and let me know how it can be tweaked!
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Heyo~ update time!
I’ve decided to put on vacation mode for the time being.
I’ve been spending my free time reading manga in Japanese (ex. Wanikani’s Absolute Beginners Book Club and bocchi), learning lyrics to j-pop/j-rock (ex. Really into YOASOBI recently, like Book 3 album), watching anime, and v-tubers, there’s some funny clips.
In terms of Japanese learning, I’m likely burned out and will need to take some time before I return.
I have a plan for when I return: to do a lot of what @drunkgome , using the cram feature as a way to remember more SRS and prevent less ghosts/leeches.
My priority right now is getting to the gym in the morning since I tend to feel much better once I do so. I’m learning to do headstands and handstands so wish me great consistency and practice~
I’ll be around in the forums here and there, and hopefully I can be more involved with Bunpro sometime in the future!
Thank you to everyone for their support over the years so far – not to be sentimental but this isn’t the end of my Japanese learning journey!
This is the first time that I’ve willingly stepped away and not just let it fade, it does feel interesting.
またねみんな!
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どもどもみんなさん~
I realize it’s been what, two months or so since I intentionally indefinite hiatus on SRS, and kinda just freestyling it.
Some reflections:
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gym stuff is going great, I’ve been going about three times a week for about 11 weeks now, starting to see some gains – seven pounds of muscle! – and can hold assisted handstand for about a minute or so
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other things, mainly having lots of food, sleeping late, working here and there (my job is remote so I am owl)
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Japanese: I guess I’ve been fine more or less actually… I did try to talk with Google assistant in Japanese and I got a good kick out of that.
I’ll try to check in more often but if you’d like to read a story see below~
それじゃみんなさん、また会おうね～
click for story time
Google Assistant has been stuck in German for years, I’m honestly not sure why. Yes I did study German in college, and I’ve changed my phone language to literally Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese over the years so why you stick on German idk
I finally think of the broken Deutsch I have “Englisch sprechen bitte”
And voila!
Yes I did look in the settings for the language but it didn’t really change much… Like it still responded in German when I changed the two language options to English and Spanish and my phone is in Spanish y’all.
And then I was like if it seriously doesn’t care about language? I’ll just use Japanese!
And I was like “hey google, 今日の天気はどうですか” and it gave me the weather in Japanese!
Anyways, I had a phase where i watched so much subbed anime and I read the subtitles here and there, depending on the genre (romcoms dont need subtitles that much, its like vocab about school life and emotions, but like sci-fi I definitely need subtitles, they katakanize like European names into tongue and galore)
I read a bit of manga here and there, bocchi volume one staring at me from my table.
And I do text my Japanese friends in Japanese, which is fun. I’d love to find or host a Japanese conversation group locally, or when I have enough money, hire a tutor on like italki.
Interestingly, I haven’t felt a great need to return to Bunpro/WK/SRS yet. Like I feel it when I’m like standing in line or waiting with nothing else to do except talk with nearby people, but they’re mostly on their phone so… I just want to do flashcards idk what to tell you 
Personal goal wise: my emotions have def stabilized more, I’m kinda like… ah I’m alive still. Over the months it’s ranging between"why am I still here" and “today actually doesn’t feel so bad thats surprising” – much kudos to going to the gym, I can just power through sets with like J-pop.
And with that, I’ll be back with an update sometime~
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