Is it even possible to catch up with a lot of Ghosts?

Bunpro
#1

Currently at Lv 58, been on bunpro for a year and a half or so. Went on vacation a few months back and didn’t turn in vacation mode or anything. Last few months I’ve been hesitant about catching up just 'cause it felt so daunting. Finally, over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying my best to tackle ten reviews an hour pretty much every hour. Unfortunately, all this seems to have resulted in is a lot of ghosts.

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It feels like I’ll complete a review session and the only result is my number of ghosts increasing.

And my reviews just keep going up and up and up. I was at ~200 or so when I first started trying to claw my way back, and then it went up to 300, and now if I’m busy and can’t do much in a day, reviews go over 400.

I’m not too stressed about catching up – at least not yet. Just kinda wondering if it really even is possible to catch up without iunno, devoting an entire weekend to catching up.

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#2

Well having a lot of ghosts is a direct reaction to getting a lot wrong. So while it is obviously possible to get rid of the ghosts overtime, that would be addressing the symptoms not the problem. It looks like you are adding more reviews then you can handle. If you have subjects that you don’t know then you’ll get ghosts. So my best advice would be to stop adding any reviews at all for a while, and for each point you get wrong review the point.

It isn’t about doing them fast, it’s about knowing the ones you’ve done.

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#3

I’ve only added more reviews when my “Beginner” items dip below the number of reviews I add at a time, which is 5. That has only happened once over the past few months, which was yesterday.

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#4

And that makes sense, but bunpro’s srs system is a bit flawed if you ask me. It’s designed in a way where even items you don’t really understand still advance (in my opinion). But if you’re regularly getting a lot of ghosts then it’s only because you got them wrong. If you are getting them wrong you are either having a lot of typos that you keep as incorrect or you don’t actually know the material yet. Which is fine.

So yes, you can get rid of the ghosts if you stop adding more items, which are currently becoming more ghosts.

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#5

but I’m not adding more items – or rather apart from yesterday, I have not been adding any items.

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#6

Things can quickly get out of hand when you take extended breaks. Ghosts are honestly a nightmare to deal with when you can barely remember anything as is. My advice would be to reset all of your ghosts and possibly set your ghost settings to minimal. If you like having a lot of ghosts then just keep the settings at minimal for a little while until you get your review pile down to a manageable amount and are confident you can get around 80% of your reviews correct.

5 Likes
#7

I would start tackling the available ghosts first. My approach would be to limit the amount I want to review in the settings, and set it to ghosts first. Reading through the grammar points again to make sure I remember how it’s used.

I don’t know what you’re ghost settings are, but set them to minimal or even off if you want to just get through the items. Alternatively, you can set review settings to put ghosts last to chug through reviews and filter out any actual known items.

It’ll take a little while, but doing 20-50 a day will whittle it down. Just don’t add anymore new items until you’ve got a handle on reviews due. Regardless of how low beginner number gets. Good luck, you’ll get through it (⁠~⁠‾⁠▿⁠‾⁠)⁠~

#8

bit over 24 hours later

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and 344 reviews; hasn’t gone down a smidgen. feels like there’s something wrong here.

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#9

Hmmmm are your Ghost Reviews setting set to Minimal?

Speaking as a user, I’d probably just Reset my Ghost Reviews, set them to minimal, and be more cautious/spend more time on each Review if I were you.

346 Ghost Reviews seems hard to come back from, unless they’re the only thing you’re doing for a while.

The SRS intervals are much shorter for Ghosts.

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4 Likes
#10

I just have it on the normal settings for Ghost Reviews. Don’t really have much time to be cautious during Reviews as I’m trying to squeeze them in at work.

#11

I’ve come back from a similar number of ghosts before without reseting. It took a really long time and a lot of effort though. They wont go down at all until you get a bunch of reviews right in a row (I think it’s 5?) for that item and then it disappears so what you’ll notice is that it feels like you’re making no progress at all and then suddenly 50 will disappear at once

5 Likes
#12

I would just disable them. In my opinion this is a quite useless feature that just wastes your time and terrorizes you massively if you are already in review hell.

It created a lot of problems for me when reviews piled up, I disabled it and afterwards everything was just better. I didn’t notice any disadvantages and never enabled it again.

The concept that you learn stuff you have problems with better if you see it over and over again is flawed in my opinion. That may work with vocabulary to a certain degree but not with grammar. You really have to understand grammar to memorize it, rote memorization is quite useless.

The problem with grammar points that haunt you is usually that you don’t really get them or you confuse them with countless synonyms (“even if“ exists in endless variations for instance). The time you waste by dealing with the ghost reviews is better invested in fixing the actual problem with these items. Try to understand them better by reading explanations or watching videos by Cure Dolly about them or make a list of synonyms if that is the problem. Ghost reviews won’t really fix your problem.

Same for hourly intervals, at the moment I’m in review hell once again (went from 60 reviews per day to 125 in one day) and now I’m doing my reviews mainly at 11pm to avoid getting them multiple times per day. The Bunpro SRS really kicks you when you are already down. I hate it. I really wish there were an option that limits reviews of single items to once per day.

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#13

what really gets me with these reviews is when I get a ghost 'cause I messed up one tiny little aspect of the grammar point, like not conjugating correctly when the grammar point isn’t even entirely about conjugation.

thanks for the words of encouragement and advice.

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#14

I would just undo them. My own philosophy is that only mistakes with the actual grammar item counts. If I mess up the conjugation of an u-verb it makes no sense to mark it as wrong because the problem was not with this grammar point.

I even undo sometimes (but not always) if I get the particle wrong or forget the na if it’s a na-adjective. Noone will get perfect in grammar with Bunpro. You have to use the language. And small errors like wrong particles will disappear fast while actually using the language. So it makes no sense to invest time in Bunpro to perfect every little detail if you can use that time to really use the grammar. That is much more effective.

Bunpro is just a good base and starting point to get ready to really use the language. And I treat it like that.

13 Likes
#15

Personally, I keep Ghosts on the default (full) setting, and I use them as a gauge to remind me to slow down when I’m going too fast.

As for getting rid of 336 ghosts: While it might appear that that would be hard to overcome, actually it really is not. Remember that ghosts only go up to SRS stage 4, and then they are slain.

The ghost stage timings are a little different than for regular reviews. They are: 4, 12, 24, 48 hours. So, if you get all of them correct (and do them immediately), that’s technically only 88 hours, which is less than 96 hours, which is 4 days.

Thus, ‘in theory’, you could get rid of all of your ghosts in just 4 days.

Of course, that’s not likely to actually happen, since they are ghosts for a reason – you got them wrong at least once before. But I would recommend thinking of ghosts as very ‘lightweight’ reviews. They don’t hang around in your review queue for ages and ages like regular leeches do.

So, surefire way to get rid of those ghosts without resorting to a Reset or changing ghosts to ‘minimal’:

  1. Stop doing any new lessons until you get your ghosts back down to a reasonable level. Depending on your preferences, probably fewer than 20 ghosts at a time is a pretty good starting level.
  2. Just continue to do your reviews as usual, until a) you start getting regular reviews correct so often that they no longer generate (very many) new ghosts, and b) you steadily, one after another, slay those ghosts by taking them seriously – if there are any that you keep getting wrong, then do some extra study/reading until you figure out how to answer them correctly.

In roughly a week or so, your current ghosts should dramatically decrease.

Only start doing new lessons after you’ve got your current review stack and ghost stack back under control.

I guess the key POV that I adopt when thinking about ghosts is that: Ghosts are opportunities to really polish up on grammar points that have been tricky in the past. I don’t see them as obstacles. Again, I use them to signal to myself that I need to slow down on my new lessons, until I can get my ghosts back down to a reasonable level.

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#16

as I mentioned earlier in this thread, I only added five new lessons a couple days ago. And to my knowledge, in the past two days, I’ve only seen a review for one of the lessons come up once, and I got it right. So it’s not anything new that’s keeping this going, at least not yet.

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#17

I was in the middle of editing my post to correct my initial misconception, but I’ll post the edit now as a reply to you instead:

Okay, after checking the OP again, I realized I missed the whole point that the OP is level 58 and it’s not new lessons that are causing these ghosts, but old items in the review queue! Ooops! Major oversight on my part. The previous advice was more oriented to someone new to BP, who’s doing too many lessons.

Okay, well, in the OP’s case, I would recommend that whenever an item is generating too many ghosts because it’s old and you forget it, and there’s just too many of these old ones in your queue, then use the settings to:

  1. Reset Progress (brings it back down to SRS level 0).
  2. Remove from Reviews.

Step 1 is kinda important because if you Remove From Reviews an item that’s at say level 9, then it will still remain at level 9, it just won’t come up in your reviews anymore.

But then, later on, when you re-Learn it as a lesson, after the little ‘quiz’ to put it back in your review queue, you actually won’t see it again for whatever the level 9 (or maybe even level 10!) delay period is.

If you just do this as you go along, like, “Uggh! I really can’t remember this one. I don’t want to generate yet another ghost! Ah! Right! [Reset Progress] & [Remove from Reviews]! Sweet!”, then you will pretty quickly weed out any/all items that are generating too many ghosts.

If you have a heck-ton of items that are doing this, then you can expedite this process by resetting a bunch of them all at once, e.g. resetting all N3 or N4, or whatever deck/path you’re using. (In Account > Settings > Reset page)

2 Likes
#18

Thanks for explaining the ghost SRS. I was going crazy like OP. Been doing a set amount of reviews each day not realizing the intervals were so low for ghosts.

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#19

Oh, the other thing about ghosts besides the SRS thing I learned from a reply here, is that a lot of them can be the exact same grammar point just a different sentence.

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#20

for the past five days I’ve been spending at least an hour and a half every night grinding through, getting 200-300 reviews done. the result?

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lol, it just seems impossible, insurmountable. It’s only growing. Guess I’ll just keep riding this, seeing how long it takes to get to 1,000 Ghosts.

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