Ghost Reviews (Update! July 12, 2018)

@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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I love my ghosts. I am at one with my ghosts. They are invaluable.

However I do check (frequently) the stats page to keep track of how many ghosts I currently have. It would be nice to have that number on the front page somewhere so I don’t have to go and count them up. It would also be great to have some kind of animation when I banish a ghost during reviews. I think that would be very satisfying, similar to seeing the WaniKani words ‘level up’ into a new SRS category.

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