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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