This one might be a bit controversial, but I’d like to be able to set vacation mode to turn on automatically on weekends (or at whatever other specified intervals a user might desire).
For the past two years, I’ve been studying every single day for several hours and it’s gotten to the point where it is exhausting to have to think about and plan around. My husband took me on a two-week vacation and it was so nice not having to worry about streaks, days studied, accuracy percentages and all of that and so I thought, “Well, what if I just left the weekends to take a break from studying?”
It would be so nice to be able to do that without having reviews piling up and without having to remember to turn on vacation mode every Friday.
If you simply refrain from doing any reviews on the weekends, some of the time BP will be rescheduling reviews to be 1 week or 2 weeks in the future. For the other cases, when the scheduling is shorter than 1 week, you can simply leave any that fall on a weekend until the coming Monday. And for those that are 1 month or longer, likewise just leave them till Monday.
It actually sounds to me (based on my own experiences) that you might be taking on too many reviews/lessons if you find it difficult/impossible to take any kind of break without coming back in a couple of days to a giant, overwhelming stack of reviews. It might be worth considering slowing down your overall pace so that it’s not as exhausting to think about and plan around. One of my first shifts to a slower, gentler, more sustainable pace was to slow down enough to the point where I could ask myself: “If I were to take a break for one week and come back, would the review stack pile up so much that it would be painful or overwhelming to start tackling it again?” If the answer is “Yes,” then I keep slowing down. Once it got to the point where I could confidently answer “No,” that’s when I started to feel a lot less stress trying to maintain my pace for long periods of time.
Maybe for you, you might only need to ask yourself about taking just two days off (one weekend), and whether or not Monday would be overwhelming or not. If you can get it to the point where you can handle the extra stack on Monday without feeling stressed or overwhelmed (like say by spreading it out through the rest of the week maybe), then maybe that would be all you need to do, instead of having to always switch vacation mode on and off. Just some ideas for ya!
I appreciate the suggestions. My overall pace is 2 grammar points and 8 vocabulary words per day. It’s not a lot to keep up with, generally I would have something like 60-80 reviews per day. (Though when I turned vacation mode back on it seems to have bugged and now I have 130-160 per day and it seems like the reviews I do just keep coming back the next day.)
Wouldn’t not doing reviews for Saturday and Sunday just leave me with 3x as many reviews for Mondays? And wouldn’t shifting the reviews in that way would make Mondays always have a bigger batch than other days? And knowing they were there and that I was not doing them on purpose would just … really bother me.
In other words, imagine the most-ideal level of reviews you could want, where you are able to take Sat and Sun off. Sure some reviews would get scheduled for Sat and Sun, but you just let them gather for Monday. But you don’t have to do all of those reviews on Monday. You could, for example, do half of them (3 days-worth divided by 2 is 1.5 days-worth, so, in effect, only 50% more than usual). Then, on Tuesday, there would be 2.5 days-worth, and you could do another 1.5 days-worth, so on Wednesday you’d only have 2 days-worth, etc. By the time you get to Friday, you’ll be back down to 1 days-worth, so you’ll have spread out all the ‘extra’ reviews across the week.
And, if you’ve worked it down to the ideal level of reviews, then in fact “1.5 days-worth” will really just be ‘a normal days-worth’ at your ideal rate.
In other words, if Monday’s stack is too big, then just slow down your new lessons until it becomes small enough again that it’s not scary to face.
It’s the same thing with vacation mode. The reviews are still there, and you’re deliberately not doing them on purpose … because you want to have free time on the weekends, right?
But ultimately, I can’t help you with that question. It’s a matter of personal priorities and motivations. What’s more important to you: Stress-free quality time on weekends, or forcing yourself to always do all the reviews all the time?
As long as you progress weekly on your reviews, it really ‘shouldn’t’ matter if some days you have a bigger stack and other days you’re able to finish the whole stack. Again, if the Monday stack seems too big/daunting, that’s a cue that your weekly load of reviews is too many; and then all you need to do is slow down your lessons until that Monday stack isn’t so big and scary.
The key point is that for the past two years you’ve been doing reviews every day, i.e. 7 days per week. Well, if you really want to have free time on the weekends, you basically need to reduce that by 2 days-worth of reviews per week, down to 5 days per week. Of course your currently-scheduled reviews are still scheduled at your old rate of 7 days-worth per week. So by not doing reviews on the weekends, you’ve (temporarily) bumped up your reviews per day by 7/5 = 1.4 times, in other words, 40% more reviews per day! So, it’s either turn vacation mode on/off all the time, or use the SRS system to slow down the number of reviews you’re getting overall, until it gets back down to a more manageable rate of 1 days-worth of reviews per day.
Anyway, it’s just a suggestion. Maybe try it out for a week or two and see how it goes. Or maybe not. Just an idea.
Requesting a better keyboard-only support. It’s not only fun for keyboard enthusiasts(I really dislike using trackpad or mouse with a laptop), but also considered a good practice from accessibility standpoint. Right now the are couple of rough spots.
On dashboard I can’t use vimium, press “tab”/“shift-tab” to activate “hourly”/“daily” buttons and smashing enter in Caret mode also does not activate them, and I want to see them without leaving comfort of the keyboard.
Almost everything I can click, I can also access via keyboard. Two buttons are the only exception.
‘Learn new grammar’ mode also has small annoyances like this, but not critical: to go from one item to study to the next one, I can use right arrow. To start quiz I can press “enter”. I can’t figure out how to navigate “summary”/“continue”, but at least I can return to dashboard by changing the url
As everyone is aware the cram page options are a little lacking, but can get the job done for larger sets of grammar.
One thing i’d love to have added is:
From the homepage when clicking on the progress of which level grammar points are at:
Beginner|Adept|Seasoned|Expert|Master|Ghosts
(And for each of these, it has a sub level 1,2,3 etc.)
It would be great to be able to cram either:
the entire subset - for eg, Beginner 1,2,3
just the subset - for eg, ‘Beginner 1’.
I feel this would be a clear directive of which grammar points to cram, as currently I just find myself loading up an entire JLPT level and aiming to complete 50 questions which is more of a ‘I hope I hit those target grammar points’ - I understand you can select certain grammar points for cram, but the process to manage sets that I need to cram is too much input each time so using the ‘progress’ information to select content for cramming instead would be much quicker for the user as well as easier in making the selection itself.
I think you’ll be happy to know that we have some big changes planned for cram in the near-future! I don’t want to give away too much quite yet, but it’s nice to hear that people’s suggestions are pretty much on the same page as things we’re discussing behind-the-scenes! It’s probably the one thing I’m most looking forward to
Ooh, I’ll keep my eye out for that then! I don’t actually use Cram as much as I’d like to in its current (slightly cumbersome) state, but with a bit of overhaul I’d be all for utilising it a lot more!
You should now able able to access the Daily/Hourly buttons Thank you for pointing that out. With the changes we have in the pipeline, improving overall accessibility is something we are working to improve upon.
I currently, on purpose, have my timezone set as a 12 hour offset to match my study schedule - My ‘new day start’ across every study software is Midday. (No big deal, just would prefer to see the upcoming schedule say AM instead of PM and vice versa)
Both you and @elro1822 can feel free to chuck me a private message if you want and we can discuss anything related to cram. From what would make you want to use it more, what currently frustrates you with it, etc. I think the improvements we have in the pipeline should do an awesome job at fixing major points of pain, but I’m always interested to hear people’s experiences! Thanks again.
(this is also open to anyone reading this and has an experience about cram they wanna talk about!)
Not sure if it’s okay to say in this thread, but I spent a couple of days with the dark mode and I gotta say I absolutely love how it works with the red color scheme. I particularly like how black color is used separately for burns, distinguishing it from the other stuff “in progress”. I didn’t know I need that when I had light mode + blue scheme; plus it looks so good. Good job, devs!
I would like to ask for a second version of vacation mode.
Lately I have been needing to do a lot of traveling and long working days for my job. I have been putting bunpro on vacation mode for these periods. The issue is I don’t actually want to take a vacation from bunpro I just don’t have time to do reviews everyday due to time/fatigue. But during the times that I am feeling energetic enough to do some reviews I am locked from doing any reviews due to having selected vacation mode.
Now I only switch to vacation mode in a vain attempt to maintain my streak even though it has no real purpose in learning. But I like it, it makes me happy. And I do not wish to lose the streak I’ve gotten. But I also don’t want to lose the primary purpose of having an account on a grammar learning website, which is learning grammar.
I would enjoy if there was a third bunpro option (considering the two existing options as: Vacation Mode and Active Mode) and that being a “Working Vacation” or something to it’s effect.
I’d enjoy it to work in a fashion like this. You get the standards SRS reviews that you have lined up for your account, but you do not gain or lose any day count or study streak. That’s it. I just don’t like losing access to the service that I paid for (at a very good price thanks again bunpro team for keeping the price of learning affordable) just because I’ve gained attached to a streak.
Yes I do understand that people could exploit this mode for, well really who cares man. If someone wants to keep their streak number at something what’s the big deal? I don’t think any exploitable features that this new mode would bring should be held against it’s implementation.
Hmm, maybe it would be possible for a plugin to be made to handle this specialized case? Like a ‘Streak Vacation’ mode?
In the meantime, I would suggest:
Turning off Vacation Mode, so that you keep the scheduling of items moving along.
At the beginning of every single day, first thing you do is exactly 1 review, and then immediately use the Finish Session feature – which is in the little ‘hamburger menu’ (which looks like ☰) on the upper left of the Review session page, and is the last item in the menu, usually either “Finish Session” or “Wrap Up Session” or something like that. This way, you will never lose your streak, but only ‘have’ to do a single review each day in order to maintain it.
Whenever you have the energy, start another review session and hammer away at your heart’s content!
All it takes is a single review per day to keep your streak going.
Also, you can do the Single-Review session at a different time of day if right in the morning isn’t good. Also you can do multiple (like, say, two) Single-Review sessions at different times during the day if you’re worried about something like time-zones or doing a Single-Review in the morning on day 1 and doing a Single-Review in the evening on day 2 (more than 24 hours in between). I don’t know how sensitive BunPro currently is to such ‘edge-case’ situations. It used to be sensitive to them in the past, but they may have improved it since then.
[Hmmm, I’m not sure about this… But, it might also be the case that doing a single Cram session/review also counts as having ‘studied’ that day. Hopefully someone else who uses the Cram feature regularly can fill us in on whether Crams count for maintaining streaks…]
This would not work for my needs, and it is not because your suggestion is poor. It is a very good suggestion but it would not fix my main issue.
I do not have access to my computer every day so I just simply cannot always pop in to do one review.
It is lack of ability not lack of desire.
Ahhhhh! Makes sense. Then perhaps it is possible to handle it via a script/plugin? Maybe @Jake or @Asher know if it would be possible? Might not be, but worth asking. If not, then as you suggest, a possible extra mode might work.
Hey, so I was looking around the FAQ but couldn’t find an explanation for the JLPT progress bar categories. My question was are the bars labeled “Master” the same as Wanikani’s “Burned” or do those items just not show up on those progress bars anymore? I wanted to be able to gauge how close some of my review items are to being complete by looking at those progress bars. Just curious, any info is appreciated. Thanks!
I wish what was being asked for in the Reviews matched with what’s available in the “Details” for the Lesson. I see this often, something like
That is what’s being asked for in this review of N4 Lesson 4: 3/18. Yet nowhere in the “Details” for that lesson is the word “objective” nor the phrase “low confidence.” How am I supposed to know what “[objective - low confidence]” means if that was literally never taught to me?
Thank you for pointing that out. With the changes we have in the pipeline, improving overall accessibility is something we are working to improve upon.
