I love Bunpro and I feel it has helped me a lot with grammar but unfortunately the SRS is really that bad and it’s becoming harder and harder to justify the amount of time I spend/waste reviewing the same grammar points. Even something as simple as jpdb’s option of choosing the interval between cards would help tremendously.
6 Likes
I’m curious what about the Bunpro’s SRS system doesn’t work for you.
3 Likes
Yeah I get what you mean, it’s been brought up several times lately.
For now you can choose how strict is the SRS, in other words how many stages an item would go down if you miss. I also find disabling or setting ghosts to minimum is better, but that’s personal.
I may be wrong but if if I recall correctly, the team is currently working on a major revamp of the review system. I’m patiently waiting for it to be released too. 
6 Likes
Go to your decks and remove things you already know from your reviews. Look for the three dots by the word/grammar point.
4 Likes
Can you be more specific? What do you find bad about it? How often they come? Are they ghosts? Are you constantly failing them?
If you really think there should be more time before your next review on a grammar point adjust it to a higher srs level through it’s info page. You can also set a default srs level for that deck to automatically make anything you learn from it a certain srs level. I personally make mine at least srs 3 so I get one review in before they start becoming days apart. I only do grammar reviews once a day anyway
4 Likes
For me it’s the opposite problem, I have to do a lot of cram to practice lower level grammar point, I think that the gap is too big when the grammar point becomes expert or even lower, I might remember the grammar points in 6 or 8 months but still, not hearing from this particular grammar point until next year doesn’t sound like a good idea.
As well it would take me around a year and a half to master a point from 0. Yes I can set it up manually but maybe the SRS could get reworked to take into account my accuracy ?
Let’s say I have to study Grammar A and Grammar B
I Fail grammar A 10 times in its ‘beginner’ phase, but then I never make a single mistake.
As for grammar point B I saw it in a lot of native content so I never made a single mistake.
as a rule of thumb grammar point A should be flagged as an item that is more prone to be forgotten and hence the review should be more intense, or further miss should hinder tighter review interval. But unfortunately it’s not the case. well it is in the beginning as the grammar point is not evolving as fast as the others but the SRS interval remains the same.
In the end Grammar point A and grammar point B will be marked as mastered with a 10 day gap, and the gap between their review is the same even though a tighter srs interval should have been set for the grammar point with more mistakes.
4 Likes
I also had a lot of problems with Bunpro’s SRS, here a few tipps that helped me:
- Disable ghosts, they are just an annoyance without any benefit after my personal experience. Ghosts will really mess you up if you already have a lot of reviews piling up. I disabled them and never ever reenabled them again and everything was much more pleasant afterwards.
- The reviews can get out of hand very quicky, if reviews are starting to pile up in an unusual way, immediately hit the breaks and stop learning new items. If you just continue it will get out of control in one or two days. Never seen that effect in another SRS, that’s a speciality of Bunpro.
- The smallest interval is an hour, that is the main source of frustrating neverending reviews over a day. If you have a lot of cards with small intervals you can cheat the system by doing all at 11pm. You get them only once per day then. Yes, that sucks and is a terrible workaround but unfortunately you can’t configure a minimum interval of one day like in Anki.
- Piling up of cards with an interval <1 day can have three reasons: you learned too much cards in a short time. Settle down to 1-5 cards per day depending on the JLPT level. The second reason is that you don’t really get the point of a card and you are just trying to memorize them without really understanding them. That makes memorization even with SRS extremely hard and you should try to understand everything first. The third reason would be that you are in synonym hell and are confusing cards with each other all the time. That happens especially from JLPT N3 material on and will get worse and worse because you’ll learn more and more synonyms. It helps writing them down and grouping them so you understand the differences better. Synonyms are also listed on cards sometimes, that helps making an overview.
I really don’t like the “Throwing reviews at you over and over again surely helps!” attitude that Bunpro’s SRS seems to have. There are always some cards that you have problems with and seeing them 12 times or more per day is absolutely no solution for that problem but makes everything just incredibly frustrating and wastes your time with something very unpleasant. It would be much better if the system would ask you if it should pause these problematic cards for a few days instead of torturing you with them.
And I really wish, Bunpro would have a system like Anki where you can do all your reviews in one turn and be done for the day. When I have a long commute to work in the morning (= much time for reviews) and meet friends after work (= no time for reviews) a SRS that gives you no reviews in the morning and a lot of reviews in the evening really messes with your life. That’s really the worst part of Bunpro for me by far.
5 Likes
You literally can, check my previous reply. Just set your default srs higher and you won’t get hourly cards.Definitely a better workaround than what you’re doing, because your way will still make it’s next review the very next day.
also Bunpro does have this? Go into settings>reviews and scroll down. Beginner items and ghosts with less than 24 hours aren’t affected but everything else will come in all at once
13 Likes
Oh, great advice! I didn’t realize you could do it for the entire deck. I’m changing it for WaraKani, since I am mostly going through old stuff there anyways.
2 Likes
Ghosts are great! If you feel like they’re piling up, just cancel them manually, but odds are if that’s happening, you probably are adding too much to your queue anyway.
Also, you can consider hitting “expert 1” done and just use the cram tool to revisit afterwards. Just mark it as such after you hit that.
Perhaps it would be OK for bunpro to introduce customization to the SRS timings. Could allow folks to change it to match WK or Anki out of the box if that’s your thing.
1 Like
Just thought I’d chime in with an alternative opinion. The system works great for me! I always learned between 10-15 points per day before I finished N3, now I’m N2 and N1 only at 5 total points. I consistently hit 90% accuracy in my reviews, and usually there’s one or two ghosts which I’m typically grateful for. It does feel like stuff is sometimes gone for too long, but overall I can’t argue with the numbers. It’s very effective for me!
6 Likes
Its been very effective for me.
The only thing I can’t stand is that sometimes the english translation is something completely unused in the lesson for the word. And that synonyms a lot of the time aren’t recognized even if they would be translated to the exact same 2-3 english words.
4 Likes
I would try to move my fill-in grammar ghosts to the more widespread ~4x growth multiplier if it was an option. E.g. 6h - 1d - 4d - 16d - slain.
Currently ghost intervals are 4-12-24-48 hours. I only do reviews once per day, so the intervals become 24-24-24-48 hours. I find that to be too easy. Instead of figuring out the grammar, I just first remember that this is a ghost from yesterday, and then the answer to that ghost.
More generally, I’m not sure what the best timings would be for grammar, because the timings are not between the same question (standard SRS), but between different questions related to the same grammar point.
1 Like
Ah, these seem to be new options that I didn’t notice when they were added. I thought I had read all update notes. Afterall I actually quit learning new grammar after I finished N2 over a year ago and focussed more on immersion so the review count is very low now. But good to know when I start the N1 cards in summer.
Especially the “once a day” setting is a game changer for me, even with only 10-20 reviews per day. I immediately activated it but at least for the current day it doesn’t seem to work. I clicked the button to change all reviews to 3am but I still have reviews in the evening left and my due review number didn’t change. Maybe it activates only for the next day.
1 Like
Hi,
I am currently working through N3 right now. Can I ask, did you always try to get your “Review Count” down to 0 every day or did you just do as much as you can? I can imagine doing 10-15 a day would pile up the amount of reviews pretty quickly. I always try to make it zero every day so I only do around 3 or 4 a day but maybe getting them all cleared everyday isn’t as important as I think it is. I was wondering what other people do.
Thanks
I do think it’s important to clear review every day. That’s the point with F/SRS based system, isn’t it ?
I’m definitely not learning new grammar points every day and I personally don’t like to set this kind of goal. The most important think is to clear my review without feeling overwhelmed. It all depends where I am at the moment and how much free time I have to study japanese. Currently I’m ok with 100 a day, but sometimes thirty is already enough. It’s all about balance.
4 Likes
If you cannot finish all of the reviews, it is usually a sign that you need to slow down on new material.
Personally, I cannot devote as much time to Bunpro on Mondays and Wednesdays, so sometimes I do not finish all of the reviews for those days, but I get it back to zero on the following days. Thursdays - Sundays are usually when I get to slay a bunch of ghosts 
4 Likes
I’m also running into a lot of frustration trying to learn grammar. My typical review session ends up being 70 to 80 percent correct, but I’m at the point where it feels like a slog to go through a study session and don’t feel I’m improving my comprehension much. I’m running into Japanese synonym hell, English synonym hell, particle conjunction construction hell, nuance hell, verb conjugation hell, SRS interval hell, accuracy hell, and burnout hell.
6 Likes
Thanks for the replies guys. Right now at max I get about 20 - 25 reviews queued up every day which does not seem a lot compared to 100 a day that was mentioned, it is good to know how others use the app. I suppose I just let it get to an amount I am comfortable with and go from there. I use another app for vocab, I use it every day as well but it got to about 100 and I take 20 -30 off of it a day and it never reaches 0 so I think I will put more focus on it from now on.
I just changed the settings to give me new reviews every day rather than every hour, that seems like a better way than seeing the reviews tick up all the time.
Thanks again
2 Likes
Could always switch to reading mode if you’d rather immerse. There’s no english synonyms when you’re reading Japanese.
3 Likes