Ghost Reviews (Update! July 12, 2018)

Is it just me or does the review counter calendar not include ghost reviews?

Just want to put in my support for this. Find it very useful for my style of learning. I don’t find the added review count to alarming as I already know the sentence and its meaning, so I don’t need to spend a lot of time reading.

Good way to quash leechers! (for me atleast)

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Update: July 12, 2018

Choose Ghost Review Aggressiveness

  • When Ghost Reviews are set to ‘ON’ in settings, a Ghost Review will be created for a sentence if you miss it once in your reviews. Set Ghost Reviews to ‘Minimal’ to only add a sentence to Ghost Reviews if you miss the same sentence more than once.

Tweaks to Ghost Review SRS

  • Ghost Review intervals are now 4 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, and 48 hrs, meaning that you will see your Ghost sentence four times over the course of the next four days.

Ability to remove all Ghost Reviews

  • You can now remove all Ghost Reviews from your review queue by clicking on Profile, Reset and selecting Ghost Reviews from the dropdown menu.

Please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions. Cheers!

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I really appreciate the super fast turnaround time! You guys are awesome.

One question: if we turn Ghost reviews off, what happens if we get a review wrong? Do we get in the “review loop” like before or does it go to the next sentence?

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Similar question to @Kirito, but I’m more curious about the Minimal case. If the SRS still moves on to the next sentence, how would you get the same sentence wrong more than once within a reasonable time period?


Also, have you updated the Ghost reviews from before this update so they use the new SRS?

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Reviews will now always move forward in their cycle even when not creating ghost reviews. The only times you will see a sentence more than once is if that grammar point only has a limited number of sentences, or if you miss a few sentences during your normal reviews so you end up being quizzed for a total of more than 12 times.

@seanblue For minimal, it will make them if you miss the sentence more than once during your review session or across multiple session before getting it correct. The logic here is that when you miss a question, sometimes it was just a typo or a situation where you didn’t read the sentence clearly and you get it wrong. However, if, when quizzed again, you miss it again, then it most likely means a few extra reviews are warranted.

As for current ghost reviews, they will update themselves as they are studied, are only a handful of advanced ghost reviews currently.

Ghost reviews themselves are still relatively new and will keep being developed. We can only gain so much insight from our own testing, but putting them out there for you guys to use gives us a lot of good data and feedback, allowing us to make changes as necessary! :slight_smile:

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I think that’s not optimal. Users who do reviews once a day get the same ghost sentence every day over 3 days and then a last time after 2 days. The sentence will still be in the short term memory and it’s too easy to answer it.
Suggestion: 8h, 24h, 48h and 96h.

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I think it’s better to drill in the Ghost reviews rather than review them over longer periods. I personally wouldn’t want to drag them out too long. Besides, having two review intervals less than 24 hours is in line with regular reviews, so it’s no different.

Normal reviews change their sentence on every SRS level, so it’s ok to have 2 reviews within 24h. But ghost sentences are always the same, every day, that’s just too easy. But it’s all still very new, so let’s wait how Bunpro is going to adjust the ghost review in the future

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Yeah that’s true. And I agree that waiting a bit and seeing how it turns out makes sense.

@Jake Have you considered adding a way to cancel/burn specific Ghost reviews? Sometimes I get a review wrong because of something not directly related to the grammar point being reviewed (for example, I just remembered to use てもらう but forgot to change it to て form). In cases like that, I kind of want to let the review be marked wrong, but I don’t want to do Ghost reviews for that sentence over and over… I don’t know, maybe I’m just nitpicking at this point.

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I agree with @seanblue

Sometimes, I think I am reluctant to allow an answer to be marked as wrong, because this means I will be seeing the same sentence for quite a long time. However, I am willing to wait and see how you will tune the feature, so I am not turning it off yet.

@Jake One observation is that getting reviews wrong early on (which is probably common) makes Ghost reviews a little weird. It’s weird because this can result in two or even three reviews for the same grammar point all popping up around the same time. Best idea I have right now is to delay the regular reviews for the grammar point until the Ghost review has been “burned”. Not sure if that’s the right change to make, but I do think something will need to be adjusted to address this.

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I hated the ghost reviews for about 2 weeks. i couldnt believe that for the 96 lessons i had learned, i had 180 reviews!

But after this two weeks, something clicked, and im fully benefitting from the ghost program. At first it was very slow and tedious, but over the rainbow the grass is greener and the reviews are much better and my grammar is improving. i got through 220 reviews yesterday in about an hour. at the beginning of the ghost program i could get through about 40 in an hour.

your system is great and now that you have different levels of the ghost reviews you are definitely making a special program and SRS system. you are very unique and I:m very glad i am subscribed to Bunpro! Keep it up.

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These are killing me, but my god they help so much! I am finding that am really finding things which i need to study more, and the ghost reviews keeping getting higher and higher percentage correct so something must be working. So, even though it has increased the workload A LOT, it is a great idea - keep up the good work!

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@Jake Follow up to my previous comment about getting early reviews wrong. Maybe it would be good to require you to get the first review right once before giving Ghost reviews for that grammar point. If you get the first item wrong, instead of giving a Ghost review and moving onto the second sentence, just repeat the first review every four hours until they get it right once. Then once they get it right move onto the second sentence and allow Ghost reviews to happen like you do now. What do you think?

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Thank you for the suggestions. It is something we will give some thought to while evaluating Ghost Review data and making adjustments to the process.

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A short feedback after using ghost reviews since a few months now: In my opinion the number of ghost reviews per sentence is ok, but the time span should definately be increased. Having 4 reviews withing 48 hours (the original sentence that I got wrong plus the first 3 ghost sentences) is annoying and completely useless to me. And then the last ghost review after another 48 is definitely NOT enough to get the rules into the long term memory.
After a while (let’s say 10 or 15 days) I forget the rules and when the grammar point comes up again I get it wrong again. So the ghost reviews just were usess cause they couldn’t reach my long term memory after just a couple of days repeating them.

So my suggestion would be, after getting the original sentence wrong (this one will be shown 2 times in the current queue already):

Ghost reviews after: 1day (24hours), 2days, 4days and last one after 8days.

Just browsing the forum and reading through this thread, I see a lot of negativity toward ghost reviews. As a new user (coming up on my first month), I want to say that they’re great for me. They’re especially important for drilling on subtle aspects of the grammar point that I forget (e.g. “needs a だ” or “needs a な”) that are only exercised in one or two sentences. Or for drilling me on less-used conjugations. Or just in general for increasing my practice on things I have more trouble with.

My only complaint is that, like much of Bunpro, they’re not documented very well. The intro tutorial never mentioned them, nor does the help page, and you have to dig around in the forums to figure out what the ghost icon is about. I still don’t have an intuitive sense of how they get generated, or how long they last, besides something like “if you get a sentence wrong it will show up again, sometimes (always?) with a ghost icon.” Which is still a great feature for me, to be clear!

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@d11 Thank you for your feedback and kind words! We are glad that you are finding Ghost Reviews beneficial. We are constantly playing around with new ideas and experimenting with different study methods, so your feedback is very helpful. You are absolutely right about the lack of information on Ghost Reviews, as well as other features, on the site. We hope to have an updated FAQ and Help page up soon that will answer any question that you may have.

Ghost Reviews have three settings; On, Minimal, and Off. With Ghost Reviews set to ‘On’, any sentence that you get incorrect in your reviews will be automatically added as a Ghost review on top of your regular reviews. Setting Ghost Reviews to ‘Minimal’, will only add a sentence if you get it incorrect more than once. This is for situations where you made a typo or did not read the sentence clearly. Setting Ghost Reviews to ‘Off’, simply turns them off.

Ghost Review intervals are 4 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, and 48 hrs, meaning that you will see your Ghost sentence four times over four days. Ghost Reviews will not affect the SRS of the particular grammar point that is included in the sentence that you got incorrect.

Please let us know if you have any more questions or suggestions. Cheers!

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