try cramming your ghosts instead. spend a couple of days doing that. after that you’ll likely be able to get 90% of them correct 5 times in a row. when slaying ghosts you unfortunately cannot afford to get 20-30% wrong even once as the SRS timings are so short.
2 Likes
Just from the information in this thread it seems like there is a very high chance your grasp on the grammar you have added is too weak or you’ve just forgotten too much over your breaks. I would personally suggest just resetting a massive chunk of grammar. Ghosts are on a sentence basis and not grammar point basis so you likely have accrued multiple ghosts for the same weak grammar points. If you either mass reset by N-level or systematically reset grammar points you are repeatedly failing then you’ll be in a position to re-learn those things from scratch without a massive review burden. Then just add things more slowly than you were doing before.
3 Likes
Kinda against resetting, tbqh. Wanna see how big this can get, or if I can bring it all the way down. Feel like – as I said – maybe if I get to 1,000, that’ll be enough. At the rate I’m going, I’ll probably be there in a week, lol.
If you’re against resetting your N level progress, perhaps you can just reset your ghosts once you reach your insane target of 1000. thereafter you can let your ghosts build up more organically and try to keep them in the range of 0-20
1 Like
When you’re gunning for that ghost slayer badge 
dude, I can’t slay these ghosts. I’ll be on Ghost 1 for a while, finally get bumped up to Ghost 2 or 3, but then I don’t see it for so long 'cause I’m dealing with so many Ghost 1s that by the time I get back to it, I’ve forgotten it, and it falls back a level.
1 Like
I’ve forgotten it, and it falls back a level
either go back through the lessons or hit the crams until it sticks. your ghosts clearly aren’t going away so something has to change.
1 Like
Like CursedKitsune said, this problem is caused by your brain being completely out of sync with the state of your review queue. As people have mentioned, progressively resetting and removing grammar points where you feel completely lost until the review load becomes manageable again seems like the only reasonable solution. You can of course just try to power through, but then the SRS system serves no purpose and you’re going to waste time banging your head against the wall for no real benefit.
1 Like
I love finishing a review session with low accuracy, getting the message “Better luck next time!”, and immediately having fifty more reviews. I have been doing about 200 reviews a day for the past few days, and it just creates more reviews.
I often miss questions with godan verbs ending in -る, and I have so many ghosts related to this that I tend to assume any review with a -る verb is a question I’ve missed in the past—and that it must be a godan verb. This creates more ghosts when I inevitably type the wrong form for an ichidan verb.
1 Like
srsly. I like the idea of ghosts. It’s just that they can become so damn frustrating. On WaniKani, I got about 2700 reviews to catch up on. But for as frustrating as that will be, I at least know that if I ever have the the time, I can catch up. Here it’s just getting repeatedly kicked when you’re down.
Part of the reason I don’t want to reset is knowing this could just happen again. I mean when I first joined the site a couple years back, it happened. And now a couple years later it just happens again. Frustrating.
1 Like
After a long break I had the same situation, a lot of ghosts.
I’ve tried switching review order to this: ghosts last, shortest interval first. Compared to the usual, random review order, I think this helped to review weak points in smaller batches, and to limit how many ghosts spawned in total.
1 Like
I like to do the opposite. Ghosts first then normal reviews, and also High SRS to Low SRS. I use the ghosts like a “long term” reminder that a grammar point. or a particular application of a grammar point, exists. After reminding myself with the ghosts, the normal reviews come and I’m not clueless to them anymore, except for new ones or the ones that will become other ghosts!
@okayfrog should fudge with the review ordering a bit (if they didn’t try yet), its possible that another setup is all they need to escape this ghost hellscape.
3 Likes
I feel like I remember seeing this option before but I don’t see it now. Where is it located?
on the top-left corner, that opens the quiz options.
I’ll give this a shot, thanks.
1 Like
I think I have a fairly unique take on Ghosts.
If I have a Ghost I will allow myself to redo my answer as many times as it takes to get it correct, without looking it up. If I’ve tried everything I can think of and still can’t get it, I fall on my sword and accept defeat, then read the info sheet and look at some examples. If I’m convinced that I really don’t get it, I’ll find a Youtube video.
I feel like this method shows my brain that it was faulty in it’s assumptions and that we aren’t going to stop until we (me and my brain) get it right. It’s made a massive difference for me and I rarely have items that become Ghosts twice.
(If it’s not a Ghost I give myself no quarter, save typos.)
This will definitely help a lot. If you handle the ghosts first, it helps you focus on the difficult items before getting to reviews that can generate ghosts. Even still, I’d seriously recommend resetting your ghosts to 0 in the settings. At 200+ reviews per day, it’s no surprise you’re having trouble remembering grammar points!
This really resonated with me.
Often I feel like I’m memorizing the answer for this question, as opposed to actually understanding the application of the grammar.
So I’ll commit the answer to short term memory, get through the ghost phases and then completely forget it when it comes up next time.
I’ve got so many grammar points where the success ratio is lower than 50%. If I do all 12 levels of a grammar point and each time have to grind through 4 ghost phases - is it really mastered? I don’t think so.
Additionally, my success when it comes to a fresh review is based on how clear the association between the hint and the grammar point is.
I mean it’s the core of the product offering, an SRS grammar system. So I’m not sure realistically what can be done. This is why you need to do more than the app (as I’m sure most of you are doing).
6 Likes
It definitely feels sometimes like the ghosts are just being memorized short term. Especially when doing reviews multiple times a day and hitting the same ghost again on the same day.
But I do like the ghosts themselves. Unlike kanji/vocab SRS, with bunpro grammar points we have whole sentence SRS. So to me these 4 passes of ghost-busting are like re-reading a native sentence in a book, like active immersion of sorts. Even if my understanding of underlying grammar is still shaky, the intuition improves bit by bit. And just like with native language I’d rely on intuition 99% of the time and only remember explicit rules 1% of the time, it’d be nice to get to the same point with Japanese.
But in the end, we are always free to accept the ghost if this specific sentence feels interesting/useful, or just skip it and move on.
2 Likes
I wouldn’t mark that as wrong unless the item was explicitely about godan conjugation. If you got the point right that the item was about then just use undo and fix the other mistake, that has nothing to do with the current item.
When you get the item the next time there’s usually a completely different example sentence where you can’t repeat the sentence where you made a mistake before. It’s pretty pointless to mark it as wrong then.
Same for typos or where you overlooked the verb at the end and used a different phrase therefore (that happens a lot in N3-N1 when you have countless synonyms).
6 Likes