This web site doesn’t seem to do as much hand-holding as Wanikani. I guess I can click “Study” as much as I want? But if I did that too much it would overwhelm my review queue…? How am I supposed to do this?
Sorry for asking such a noob question but I looked all over the forum and still don’t get it
I’m not sure there’s a “right way” really, but I’ll tell you what I did.
In the beginning I had already studied some grammar on Lingodeer, so I went through everything I already knew at about 15-25 new points per day. Then once I got new things, I worked my way down to what I felt I could handle in terms of new content per day. Figured out about how long it would take me to reach a goal, say new N4 materials, at said pace. After that it’s just a matter of doing so many reviews per day/week.
I will say that as I got to higher levels, I definitely slowed the pace down. I’m currently studying for N2 in July and I do 2 sets of 3 points per week, with the occasional week of 9 new points. This keeps me from overloading myself and allows me to do a lot of cramming in between to make sure I’ve really cemented the points, and even go back and re-read some of the curated readings/videos.
TL;DR- Just find a pace that works for you where you’re making progress you’re satisfied with, but not to the point that you don’t really remember how the grammar works after your review session is over.
I pretty much agree with Houndstooth. What workload you can handle really depends on your circumstances.
If you’re only on Bunpro once a day, I don’t think I’d enjoy doing 100 reviews in one go.
If you’re here 5 times, doing 10-25 reviews each isnt that bad.
For me, the most important guideline is moving along with other material.
It’s rather pointless to know lots of grammar but no kanji/vocab and the other way around.
Obviously a bit of a disbalance is fine, I’d even say it’s good to be ‘ahead’ with your Kanji studies, but I’m sure you get what I’m trying to say.
Find something you’re working towards (Finishing Genki, Reading a book with FolFlo, …) and move everything along at an somewhat even pace.
If it’s grammar you’ve studied previously and are comfortable with, you can be pretty aggressive with adding new lessons to your reviews— maybe 1-2 dozen per day. Just be aware that anytime you add a bunch of lessons at once (or knock out a bunch of reviews at once), they’ll all resurface again in similarly large batches.
When I’m going through completely new grammar, I usually go for 1-3 lessons per day unless they feel particularly easy, then maybe I’ll add more. I always add whatever looks easiest, which makes every single step forward feel non-intimidating.
The review system works best IMO if you can visit for small review sessions multiple times per day; check in frequently, but don’t spend very much time on each visit.
(Also, when lessons have similar English translations, or use the same Japanese vocabulary word, avoid adding those lessons to your reviews simultaneously. Otherwise, you might find yourself constantly confusing the similar grammar points for much longer than should be necessary.)
(Also also, I don’t know what the default setting is, but I’d recommend setting Ghost Reviews to “Minimal” to start with.)
And/or self-study sentences. 
I’ll echo “whatever works for you”. When I first picked up Bunpro I had already worked through a somewhat decent textbook, so I dumped all of the N5 lessons into my queue at once. I was in review hell for a while but it stabilized eventually.
After that I did 10 lessons per day until I finished N3, at which point I stopped doing new lessons completely for a while. I’ve recently started going through N2 at 3 lessons per day and it feels like a nice sustainable pace – right now I’m on track to finish in 19 days.
Something really nice about Bunpro is that you can reduce your workload in two ways; either by manually “burning” items that you know really well, or just removing them from your reviews so you can come back to them later. At this point I don’t even hesitate when I see something like だ or から, so there’s no reason to waste time reviewing them – that’s what the “I know this!” button is for. On the other hand, I don’t have any need to memorize keigo exceptions right now, so there are some N4 grammar points that I totally ignored. Bunpro gives you a lot of power with regard to how you tailor your studies, so “find what works for you” is really the best advice anyone can give you.
Do you get xp when manually burning items?
Yes, it’s the same as if you leveled up the normal way.
Thanks for making this topic thread.
I find myself in the exact situation, I come from Wanikani where everything feels easy to follow and I am having a little trouble to adapt with Bunpro.
I will follow what people have advised and hopefully get over this problem asap.
I came from Wanikani with almost no grammar knowledge, so my method has just been to study once a day, then drop back to once every few days, so that I’m not confused by new items. I’ve probably not done enough self study using the readings which means I’m progressing fairly slowly but that’s ok.
I am probably slow learner here. I only show up once aday (sometimes twice). I only do three lessons a day. Mostly because i fairly new to grammer study.
I went too fast the first time and had to restart. Now I aim to do ~30 reviews a day, and I add more lessons whenever the projections are below that. The further into bunpro I get, the more abstract everything is, and I’m preferring this very slow style so I’m not overwhelmed.
This is pretty much exactly it for me, too. The first time I just went HAM on the grammar, drowned, and disappeared off Bunpro for well over a year.
Now I do 2 reviews per day, sometimes 3 if they’re especially easy. And I won’t do any lessons if I have a bunch of things sitting in ghost reviews that I’m just not nailing.
I don’t have a link to it but there’s a script that shows your future accumulated reviews which is fantastic and I would highly recommend if you’re not sure how much to do.
It’s a lot easier to decide to not do 4 extra lessons when you can see in 5 days you’re already going to have 80 reviews to do
Could someone post a link to this script? That’d be pretty helpful. I already have some grammar knowledge and I’m doing 5 lessons per day plus reviews. For me, 100 reviews isn’t too bad for me, as I go pretty fast and I spend around 20 minutes on bunpro daily anyways.
I am concerned I might be going too fast as 200 reviews would definitely be overwhelming and classes resume at the end of the month.
Edit: I think I found the script.
Planner by @pcontrabass: Inspired by Wanikani Ultimate Timeline this script adds a timeline chart to your profile page displaying the upcoming reviews in the next 24h interval.
Maybe it’s no use anymore to reply because it has been a couple of months sinth the question, but here is my opinion on the matter : it depends on you and your learning capacity.
For example, i can handle 3~ 5 new grammar points per day (depends on the difficulty) and 10 already-knew grammar points per day
But for the vocabulary, i know 20 new words per day is my extreme limit (if i am not tired, if i am focused, etc). Upper 15 new words, my brain will have difficulties to remember all the new words.
So even if Bunpro seems to let you learn unlimited new points, if you pay attention to your learning capacities, and the difficulties you encounter during your reviews, you will find what we call in french “your cruise rythm” 
It has been more than a couple of months - this thread is over three years old 笑 Vocab didn’t exist on Bunpro at that time.
On this topic though, it highly depends on your retention rate, free time, the frequency of the grammar point itself, etc. I kinda always liked the idea of doing +5 for N5, +4 for N4 etc but that would probably end up being a bit quick for most. Keep in mind that if you just do +1 a day every day then you will have added everything in like under 3 years, which is a very solid pace for getting to N1 (assuming you’ve done all the other work as well).
Jumping on the “couple years late” response train, in case anyone comes across this in future: my tactic is one I borrowed from wanikani, where I use my “beginner” grammar points to pace myself.
I try to do all my reviews each day (some days I don’t manage them all; that’s okay, it happens), and if my “beginner” reviews are below 10 for grammar, I’ll do another three grammar lessons. This works nicely for me because it gives me an easy rule of thumb for how often to click study (as OP first put it) while still keeping the brakes on for pacing (because I’m also doing WK, and reading manga, and listening to youtube LP’s, and working, etc etc etc…)
For vocab, right now I’ll do 6-9 reviews if my “beginner” are below 15. But I’m going through vocab that I mostly already know right now, so that might slow down eventually.
All of this is with the assumption that I’m feeling up to it that day: if I have a day where I get slammed with reviews or I’m busy at work or I slept badly or for any reason my brain just is not having it, then I just focus on doing whatever reviews I can manage and save the lessons for a different day.
And of course, you can choose your own number to set for beginner reviews – I keep it at 10, which is admittedly rather slow. But if you want to go faster you could work with a higher limit.