I turned on ghosts from vocab, but I really don’t get it. It feels like it’ll mark anything I get wrong as a ghost, like I forgot a “-” at the end of hamburger once and it became a ghost instantly. There’s also words that I’m genuinely not sure how they ended up in the ghost like. Like somehow cat and dog are in there but I never would’ve gotten them wrong, so how did they be come ghosts? There’s words I wouldn’t mind being ghosts but too many feel like too many are becoming ghosts too quickly.
How exactly do I use this feature?
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by default ghosts are created every time you submit an incorrect answer. Personally I am not a fan of this since it buries you under ghosts if you forget something recently learned. There are two good workarounds for this. The first is to go to the review settings page and scroll down to the section for ghosts. You can change that to minimal which should change it to only create ghosts when you get something wrong twice (in a row i think perhaps @veritas_nz can clear this up)
The second way will still generate ghosts when you submit any incorrect answer, but it will prevent ghosts being created when you make a silly typo. You can always undo an answer by pushing backspace and retyping the correct answer. An answer will only be submitted as incorrect if you push enter again after having gotten the answer wrong. So for example, if you were to type コーヒ instead of コーヒー you can just hit backspace and put in the correct answer the system will recognize it as never having been wrong so no ghost will spawn.
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If your settings are set to Minimal, it will only create them on second incorrect answer (during “Wrap Up” – as @drunkgome mentioned).
By default, Grammar is set to Minimal and Vocab is set to Off.
If you go to the Advanced section of that Reviews Setting page, there is also the new Minimum SRS For Ghosts setting.
Its description:
Choose the minimum SRS level Grammar/Vocab needs to be before Ghost Reviews are created.
Ghosts are kind of what you make of them.
If you are a true masochist you can turn them On for both Grammar/Vocab and bath in the river Styx like a tormented soul.
It’s up to you! 
Personally, I set Ghosts to Minimal and purposefully only get items wrong during Wrap-up if I want to set a Ghost for them.
^Ghosts are created for sentences of items and not for items themselves.
So I usually create them for usages of Grammar/Vocab that I didn’t know / think are interesting useful.
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Oh must have missed that one! Sounds really useful 
I’m gonna try it right now
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I think I now understand why I was seeing so many vocab ghosts before tweaking my settings a bit.
I hadn’t thought about this! I’m usually so focused on getting things right I didn’t think getting them wrong could be beneficial.
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I had ghosts fully on for both grammar and vocab for a while. For vocab I felt like this was not helping me, because when the vocab I struggled with got to a “middle” SRS level the following would happen:
- Get the vocab wrong and create a ghost.
- Review ghosts for a week and get vocab right in ~ 1 month.
- Forget about the vocab until it shows up again in ~2 months.
- Get vocab wrong and create a ghost (rinse and repeat)
So I have not internalized the vocab yet, and the ghosts were just boosting up my short term memory, artificially holding the vocab at that stage, and burying me in ghost reviews. Plus, having all those ghosts discouraged me from learning new vocab.
Since turning ghosts off for vocab, the review numbers have dropped and these vocab are slowly going down in SRS level. I’ve decided to do as someone said and “trust the SRS”. I might tweak the strictness of the SRS for vocabs next if I feel like I still have some stuck in this limbo.
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Nice idea, intentionally creating ghosts like that during wrap up 
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