Drowning in Review Flashcards

[DioSer]

How would you go about a substancial backlog of pending flashcards in your review queue? I have combined 920 stack (N3 + N2), and I’m hesitant about full reseting considering I don’t think it’s a wise choice to erase all the progress I’ve made so far. Going by all the flashcards manually is currently unfeasible considering my other daily obligations (work, studying, routine etc.)

Any suggestions based on personal experience or general recommendation as a work around on this? My apologies if the topic has been discussed on another thread before. Thanks!

[Kyubai]

I would just work through them over the course of multiple days/weeks.

If you stop doing new vocab/grammar until your reviews are down to something manageable you’ll get there eventually.

[DioSer]

Thanks. I think the queue regenerates over time even if there are no new topics included.

[Brux]

I’m not sure if you could do this but might be worth a shot.

Look to put your account into vacation mode, and then as Kyubai has mentioned, work through them over a set number of days. Maybe limit it to 100 cards a day so that it spaces them out when they’re due for review next time. Putting your account in vacation mode will also stop new items being added to your queue for the duration I believe.

[Nope]

Have a bit of a long review queue myself, here’s what I’ve been doing and it seems to slowly be working:

1. As Kyubai said, stopping or at least really slowing down new items.

2. Changing ghost creation from everytime to every other mistake

3. Changing review queue to ghosts first.

4. Changing review order to highest ranked first. This prevents items I’m beginning to grasp from getting buried until I forget them again.

5. Using the decks instead of the review queue. That way instead of 400 beginner 1 level cards, I only have a few dozen. Much easier for me to work through. Textbook decks are great for this

So when I review it goes like this:
Use the review button until I at least finish all my ghosts, then back out and go to one of the decks.

Not gonna lie, it’s slow. But it seems to be working and I definitely feel like I’m learning things.

I didn’t know about the vacation thing though. Thank you Brux, I might try that!

[DioSer]

Those are useful tips, thank you all so much. I’m having a hard time finding the toggles for tips number 2 and 3, respectively. Maybe they are somewhere besides the image below?

[Nope]

Looks like you have ghost reviews off, they’re the second and third drop down menus on the screenshot.

I never was able to find the queue order options on that page. Instead I found them in the settings when you’re doing reviews.

Start a review, then open settings and switch to the queue order tab. Should be there.

[awittybarb]

I just finally made it through a stack of 500ish reviews a few minutes ago. I paused my learning for a few months due to illness but vacation mode apparently didn’t work. It took me about 3 weeks to get through this stack, but it’s honestly been a nice way to ease back into studying… (I did minimal amount of work for half the days since I am still sick, so time to completion will vary person to person )

I personally looked at the grammar list first and removed any of the newer items that I just did not remember at all, then just did what I could per day. No new grammar or vocab, just chipping away at reviews. Avoiding ghosts is a good idea, as others have suggested.

[lunchbox1]

This is not conventional advice, but just sit down and get them done when you have time. It’s less than you think (saying as someone that loves resets to increase frequency and will often go through 1000+ in a day).

[burgerkingler]

I set my view order to oldest/most familiar first because I’m more likely to get them correct and it kicks them out of the queue for much longer. Newer stuff will suffer but that’s tomorrow’s problem

[DioSer]

Thanks, I made the modifications. I was thinking about leaving the tab open non-stop so I can tackle the cards throughout the week, but I don’t know if that will prevent the queue from growing?

[scarrera]

I would stop adding anything new and do reviews sessions of 50-100 or so throughout the day. Like do one at 9am, then 11am, 2pm, 4pm. Next day the same until it gets down to a normal number (for you).

Don’t push it too much. As long as you can keep a consistency the number will go down. Plus you also want to learn so no point in clearing the list for the sake of it.

[hotfu]

I got quite a bit behind and am also trying to get my reviews back under control. What’s been helping me get through it is to do the reviews from the “Decks” screen, and focus on getting one deck under control at a time. This lets me focus on a smaller set of reviews and move them along in the SRS until they start becoming less frequent. It seems more manageable and I can prioritize the content better.

[DioSer]

Hi. This is actually such a clever idea. I’ll start doing that from now on. It definitely feels less daunting. Thanks.

[casual]

I also need to get my massive pile of vocab reviews back on track.
On jpdb there’s no option to review by deck like on Bunpro, but there is an option to temporarily suspend cards outside of X most frequent words. So I’ll try to first clear out all reviews of top 3k words, when that’s done, start on top 6k etc.

Even if the total backlog is the same, somehow it feels better to only see a manageable part of it at once. Getting a counter of 100 down to 0 feels much better than barely moving a counter of 2000, and every bit of motivation helps to keep going.

[DioSer]

Is there anyway to stop cards from regenerating?? I do them but on a span of hours they just come back!

[IcyIceBear]

keep knocking them out to increase their srs out of beginner or until the ghosts are slain. as the srs gets higher theyll appear further and futher apart

[hx9]

Unintuitive solution, but as you work through them, if you get them wrong, remove them from your queue, but don’t reset them, and relearn them later. When you relearn them, you can decide to either reset them or return them to the same SRS level.

This will make the return of your review items more spread out and raise your accuracy which should increase your motivation a bit to get more done at the same time.

[DioSer]

Hey. Sorry, can you elucidate on what you mean by “remove from queue but don’t reset”? Not sure I understand how to do that…

[IcyIceBear]

Open item info and find the srs progress bit. If on mobile that’s in the side bar. Otherwise it’s just the little cog next to the srs progress bars. Remove from queue will take it out of reviews until you “learn” it again or add it back. It’ll keep its srs level as is unless you reset progress which will take it back to 0, as if you’ve never seen it before ever

Summary