Do you wanna be a Ghostbuster but hate ectoplasm? If you’re anything like me, then you’d want to have the ghosts turned on. Oh, I guess it could help with learning Japanese, if you really want to do that.
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I have ghost reviews set on minimal and I´m quite happy with it.
When I first started Bunpro, the Ghost SRS was a little different and they kept haunting me up to a point where I dropped Bunpro altogether (not the only reason, but a big part of it).
With my reset start I decided to go the minimal route because ghosts are an important indicator on which grammar I did not fully understand.
Sometimes I make mistakes by just misinterpreting a hint or have an other grammar point in mind, so when I get it wrong the first time, I can re-read the explanation and just move on. If I get it wrong a second and third time, I know I didn´t understand the grammar as properly as I thought and have to tackle the ghosts until I get it in my head.
At this point I usually bookmark the grammar and start a cram session with similar grammar points to drill the differences. Works like a charm so far 
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Ghosts on here, no question about it. The way I look at it:
- The initial study is for me to understand the grammar in order to apply it later.
- The SRS helps me not forget what I have learned. (Note, it doesn’t help me learn, it just reinforces existing knowledge)
- The ghosts are for all the times when I didn’t learn the grammar well enough, when I learned a new grammar item later that caused confusion, etc. That’s when I clear up my mistakes and confusion.
Another way I look at it is that if I got something wrong, it’s something I have difficulty with, would it be enough for me to see it again in, say, 10 min, get it right there and then not see it again until in the next SRS stage which is in 2 weeks or 2 months? That’s doubtful.
On the other hand, if I got something wrong and I’m of the opinion, “hey, I thought I knew this quite well”. It should then be easy to just go through the ghosts at 4 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, and 48 hrs, right? Experience has shown me that, yes, sometimes it is easy, but sometimes it really isn’t. The extra practice really helps.
If I have trouble with too many ghosts, it is usually because I was greedy with the grammar points. This is a marathon, not a sprint.
Edit : I allow myself a few exceptions to ghosts. If I make a typo, I use the backspace key or the Oops button to try again. Also, I never ever create a ghost the first time I’m doing a grammar point because that’s just a failure in short-term memory. Finally, if I have come up with 2-3 answers that are correct but not exactly what Bunpro was looking for, I sometimes give myself a pass on that one.
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Off. They kind of annoy me. If I get stuck on a grammar point I just manually reset it or run drills with the cram feature.
I think if they could be done separately I’d really enjoy them and wouldn’t mind the extra practice. I’d just rather focus on my actual reviews without being bothered by a bunch of nuisance ghost typos.
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I’m about to make your day. You can use the backspace key to undo wrong answers (e.g. to correct typos), so you don’t end up with a ghost for those. It’s also useful for grammar points that have very similar English translations, but they staff hasn’t yet added a hint for (more common at the N2/N1 level).
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@Jake This is an extremely common problem for users to have. Can you put in the right hints to teach users that they can do this? I can think of two places for such an affordance:
- If someone goes to the settings to change ghosts to minimal / none, teach them that they can use the Oops button / backspace
- If someone creates a lot of ghosts and never uses backspace / Oops button, tell them about it.
Such an affordance would have saved me a lot of grief …
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Technically it does tell you, but it isn’t very obvious
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@Slysoft I personally use Minimal Ghosts! I feel like the default setting can be a bit overwhelming. You can get the Exorcist badge faster with the default setting though. 
@narfi There’s actually already plans in motions to address this in a future update for Reviews. Can’t disclose much right now but know that we’re aware it’s not the best way to teach hotkeys. Stay tuned!
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I also think that it would help to delay continuing your reviews (or the option of a delay) when you incorrectly answer a review. Half of my ghosts are just typos that got marked as incorrect from double-tapping the Enter key. Part of the problem is me trying to quickly get through my reviews in the little time that I have to do them, but it’s frustrating to have ghosts pop up when I know I never really got them wrong.
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definitely on, they are like leeches (on wanikani) right?
I have 21 at the moment, I think it is a good number so far. Some points dont stick to my mind at all
most of them are those ‘I heard/seems’ that have many ways to say. Even with hint it is hard to remember all.
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Turned them off and enjoying the site a lot more without them. They just became unmanageable for me.
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I keep them on but I don’t do new lessons if I have more than 10 ghosts. To be fair I’m going slow - but it works really well for me
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This thread jinxed me. I went from 15 ghosts to 35 in a week…
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ghosts are annoying, but I’ve found that they help significantly in the long run
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Ghosts are purgatory, but they prevent you from reaching leech hell, so they’re great. Leave them on and just match your speed to the daily review load.
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I’m just getting started again after a long break and forgot all my past experience…
I’ve already decided to keep ghosts on, but not sure which level to choose: Yes vs minimal?
Would love to here from people who switched between these two instead of just using one or the other the whole time.
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TL;DR: I'm not rushing, so I changed mine from 'Minimal' to 'Yes' for the shallow reason of getting Badges. Gotta catch 'em all!
I think it depends on how much you learn Grammar per day/week/month and if you’re swamped with Review load or not. And of course if you’re in a hurry for a certain JLPT exam date or not. In my case, I have a very relaxed pace and only following the slow pace of my weekly Japanese class.
Mine was set to ‘Minimal’ before this, and back then I would only do 1 or 2 new Grammar if my SRS 0-2 went below 3.
But sometime later I saw a shiny badge made for Ghost slayers (gotta kill those 9999 ghosts!), and since I’m in no rush to add new Grammar as my Genki 2 class is yet to catch up, I’ve changed it to ‘Yes’.
Now both my Reviews and Ghosts are growing in numbers as expected. At the moment, I’m putting on hold any new Grammar studies despite my SRS 0-2 being 0 until my daily Reviews are at a low number.
I’ve also changed my Min/Max amount of reviews to do daily from when I first started. Before it was 5 Min / 15 Max but now it’s 10 Min / 30 Max Reviews daily. I might adjust my Min/Max again in the near future if my Reviews doesn’t budge any much lower over time.
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I’ve honestly just used normal ghosts the whole way, although I will admit there are some times where I just speed through ghosts and answer purely based on the English prompt since I’ll save the full sentence-reading experience for when it’s a normal review. I think minimal might work best if you have a ton of points that are SRS 8+ where if you get it wrong once you’ll probably remember it for next time. I’ve never used minimal though so my experience might be wrong, would love to hear from others that do minimal!
And as @distantflower said, gotta get those badges 
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I’ve got them on minimal and it’s worked well for me. I found that having them all on was too much (I have a horrible habit of clicking through things too fast and created a horrifying army). Minimal allows me to mess up once and then if I mess up again, it’s ghost time and I probably deserve it. I also will sometimes create a ghost on purpose if the grammar point is confusing/a combination of a few that I want to practice more.
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Agreed, I recently finished up N2 which is what I was rushing to. With minimal ghosts I was still getting close to 100 reviews a day. Now that I’ve finished that though, I turned them back on fully and tend to have about 40 reviews a day. I think minimal is good when first learning stuff, especially if covering a lot of material. Full ghosts, however, is a good way to catch stuff you were struggling on after you get through the bulk.
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