Limit SRS interval to the end of the day?

Bunpro
#1

In Anki I do my review for the day in the morning and then the counter stays at 0 until the next day.

In Bunpro I can go through, say, all 250 reviews in the morning and after one hour the reviews I failed and other due reviews are starting to pile up so that in the evening I will have again a lot of reviews piled up.

That feature is absolutely killing me right now as I had a few days where I couldn’t do all review and I have around 400 reviews every day now (with intervals like in Anki it would be around 200 I guess). That is hardly manageable for me anymore. I would prefer the Anki system much more as it is not frustrating as hell and doesn’t create that many reviews (with Bunpro I can get the same card multiple times per day, with Anki only once after getting it right one time).

Tried the setting with daily/hourly intervals but that seems to be just for the widget view in the dashboard.

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#2

I will say u have ghost on… you can disable them in the settings if you think they pile up a lot

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#3

Thanks for the quick reply!

But aren’t ghosts just the cards I didn’t know? That’s how I understood them. I don’t really won’t to disable them as after a few days I usually know them well enough so they vanish again.

My main problem is that I can get a card I didn’t know multiple times per day. I really would like to get rid of that because it increases the amount of reviews per day to an insane level. In Anki I get a card I didn’t know until I know it one time and then it is gone until the next day. I’d like Bunpro to behave like that.

I guess I could just do my reviews in the morning and then ignore Bunpro for the rest of the day (unsatisfactory but better than review hell) but if I understood the system correctly not only cards I got wrong will appear later on that day but also cards that I knew in the evening in their last interval. So they still will pile up more than necessary for the next day.

Also if I don’t have the time for all cards in the morning (which is surely the case at the moment where I have over 200 due reviews in the morning) and want to split it over the day I will get cards I didn’t know multiple times per day.

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#4

This is super interesting to me because I left Anki (moved to Kitsun, but for other reasons as well) to avoid this, as there is no way to make the SRS intervals happen within one day. As I got into many hundreds of reviews per day (I think my threshold ended up being around 300,) it became rather annoying as I could no longer do them as part of my morning routine and needed to have smaller chunks that I could do throughout the day. Now I do maybe 100 in the morning and then every time I get some free time I can do 100 more or so.

Anki’s system forces you to have a day between reviews at least, but if I failed, I’d want to see that card again. Mostly to lower the number of ghosts, by getting more practice. I hate ghosts/leeches. Though, some systems have really short intervals even when you get them right the first few times.

Perhaps all of the systems should have both? A big problem, I’d imagine, from a technical perspective, is that most of these systems do not handle doing partial batches well, because you have to keep going until you get a card right to finish the batch. Kitsun has a button for that, I’m not sure if Bunpro does; I usually just leave the window open until I have time to go back and hope nothing refreshed, haha. None of my other SRS systems do either. I’ve never attempted to program an SRS so I don’t know how difficult that would be, but small batch sessions are a common feature request that I’ve seen.

Anyway, I hope you’re able to figure something out!]
I do think you could just ignore bunpro, but you could also tick off some of the reviews that are giving you too much trouble. I did that a while back and really helped me. I think that’s why Anki kills your leaches after too long; it really does raise your review time exponentially for every leach.

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#5

Anki is not perfect but if you go to review hell because you added to many new cards and don’t have the time to do them all in the following days, you can invest a bit more time every day and reduce the mountain bit by bit. Also annoying, but manageable, I did it multiple times.

But the only solution for Bunpro in that scenario would be to wait until, say, 10pm and do all reviews at once. And that is just impossible to do for me. Now I’m caught in some kind of review hell where I have 300-500 reviews every day and it gets smaller very, very slowly and wastes a huge amount of my sparetime. I never had that with Anki in such a horrible way.

So Anki is the lesser evil I guess. :slight_smile:

I’m on the verge of quitting Bunpro for a long time because it turned from fun to a extremely frustrating nightmare in only maybe ten days. Maybe I switch the ghosts off just to get rid of reviews until everything is manageable again.

The best feature for me would be editable intervals so I could set the smallest one to 24 hours. That would solve my problem immediately. I saw some discussions about that on the forum but it doesn’t seem like something changed in that regard, the posts are quite old.

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#6

Oh wow, how many cards do you have, and how do you keep your reviews so low? I’m over 90% correct on mine but I still have many hundreds a day (I probably have about 1000-1200 cards, not including sister cards, I’m still very new, almost done with N5.) If there is a way to lower reviews but still retain the information, that would be awesome.

#7

So what you-ure saying that your problems are the ghost , just disable them if you fail a sentence it will come later it doesnt dissappear , or you can turn ghost to only if you fail 2 times,
the problem is if you get a sentence fail, it become a ghost so you have your normal revies plus the ghost and the ghost i think it has like a 4hours 8 hours, 12 and 24 hours till u get rid of them, i dk the srs of the ghost
but i recently completed all the grammar of N1 and i tend to fail a lot and i put my ghost to (2 fails) and i have to say that it has lowered my reviews… so i will recommend you to do that
the ghost is only a plus feature to put more reviews on your normal reviews so you can get the same review you fail a lot to get it stick to your head

hope it helps , sorry for my bad english bro

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#8

and replying to that, like i said… its a yes and no,
because in your reviews you have reviews that you dont know but they’re the normal reviews that if you fail its gonna appear till u get it right , and yes because a ghost appears when you fail a review, so yeah like i said having ghost is having a double of your review that will apear for 4 hours 8 hours 12 and 24 or 48 hours idk… but yeah it works like that

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#9

I have 324 grammar points (all N5, all N4, currently doing N3 and also some of N2 and N1 I already knew).

In Anki I have around 18,500 cards I learned over the last five years and it is much more manageable. :slight_smile: Around 170 reviews per day.

Two weeks ago I had maybe 80 per day in Bunpro. It’s crazy how fast it can go out of control. I never learned more than 10 new cards per day, most day I had 5 new cards. So I didn’t add 50 cards in one day or something crazy like that. The main problem was that I could do only 20-40 cards per day for around five days in a row. And everything went to hell afterwards. I never had something like that with Anki.

Just did a lot of reviews (still over 100 to do…) and after the clock switched to the next hour Bunpro added around 30 cards to the remaining ones. I can’t state how frustrating that is to me.

#10

this is the ghost feature… just disable it

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#11

Thanks, I’ll try that tomorrow to see how much reviews it will remove.

Per se I like the ghost feature and I managed to get rid of the ghost when the review count was still sane.

But now I just want to be able to use Bunpro in a normal way again. :sob:

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#12

i think when you switch off ghosts it doesn’t remove them of your reviews so maybe you will have to do all the ghost and get rid of them manually . but well its gonna be decreasing along the days so u’ll reviews in some days should be fine.
Anyways since anki is a vocabulary and u did like 18k cards it will be crazy having 2k reviews per day or something like that in bunpro right? because if you think, in bunpro there are 909 grammar points in total so having 100 a day or 200 a day till you get all the knowledge they provide i think is not that bad , because there is not only grammar, u read a sentence every time you do it so its a good way to memorize how japanese language works and etc… so i will say, don’t remove it or att least put them only if you fail 2 times a sentence is how i have mine .

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#13

I’ll play around with it and see what will happen. In the worst case I’ll quit Bunpro for a while after the weekend. At the moment it’s just pain and I learn Japanese just for fun as a hobby.

2k reviews in Bunpro seems to be completely unmanageable for me. At the moment I do around 300 per day and the amount of time it takes is very painful. I really have to get it down to 50 reviews a day.

The 18k Anki cards are not all vocabulary but also around 2400 kanji and sentence mining stuff. Also all vocabulary cards are bilingual, so I have two cards per word. I learned English mostly through media consumption, so only one way, and while I understand English on a more or less native level I’m far worse in writing and especially speaking it. I wanted to avoid that mistake with Japanese and so far it worked. I know only around 6500 Japanese words.

Bunpro is also more difficult for me because it is in English. My Anki cards are all in my native language which makes things easier.

#14

Oh wow, in Anki, I reached over 200 a day adding 5-10 per day in less than a month. I still have well over that not counting sisters(/the repeats from the srs that you don’t like) in kitsun and I only have around 700 of my words in there. In fact, I have around 250 left that will come today, not counting the repeats after I do them and I’ve already done over 200 today. That’s not including my other SRS stuffs.
I wonder if one of my settings was off in Anki, then again, it hasn’t really changed to much in kitsun, so maybe it’s normal.
170 reviews per day sounds very nice, though, maybe it’ll level out as I get further in.

Anyway, not what you were commenting for but you gave me some perspective! :smiley:
I wonder if my experience or yours is the more normal SRS usage.

#15

I don’t add stuff to Anki every day. I usually break up my learning experience in areas like vocabulary, grammar, sentence mining etc and I do that for a few weeks until I can’t stand it anymore and switch to something else. And I didn’t add much vocabulary to Anki since last fall. Also I did all jouyou kanji back in 2018 and I add only new non-jouyou kanji I encounter which is not that often anymore. So the SRS reviews for that are very low now.

In the phases where I add vocabulary every day to Anki I have around 400-500 reviews per day. Which I consider quite annoying. After a few weeks the reviews go down to 200 per day.

That keeps me from burning out. In the beginning I went the traditional way and learned vocabulary, grammar, kanji etc at the same time. But I kept burning out again and again. By doing everything in blocks I managed to avoid burnout. At the moment I’m in a phase where I learn only grammar (my biggest weakness anyway, I’m only around N3 level while everything else is N2 or even N1 level). But I’m definitely in burnout territory there right now. :slight_smile:

#16

Oooh okay, that makes sense! I think I’m too early in to not add words every day, pretty much any time I read story or talk to anyone, there’s another word I didn’t know! I’m learning a lot of snow/cold related words right now from all of the social media posts lately. Celebration/Party related words from new years last month. Heck, I learned some grammar points just from my Japanese friends going ‘you know there’s a better way to say that, right?’ which is why I have some grammar points higher than N5.

I think for me, the variety actually helps preventing burnout. I also have a metric crap ton of hobbies, so Japanese study is almost a break from the other stuff, which tends to be a lot more…complicated, and in some cases a lot more physically draining. I also haven’t really put pressure on myself to learn anything in any specific time frame, which I think helps reduce stress. Of course, I’m saying all of this at N5 level, I know it gets a lot harder as you go further, but then more options open up at N3 where you can start properly immersing and remove some of the tedium, so I suspect N4 will be the worst period of study. In the past, I always stopped because I felt like I was making no progress. That hasn’t been a problem this time, even when I feel stuck on grammar points, I can see the percentage correct going up every review.

I hope removing the ghosts does what you want! I can’t wait to hit a stride where I’m doing less than 200 a day. Sticking to it is the most important thing, imo, so we gotta do what works!

#17

Even I, one of the more hardcore users of bunpro, for a time before my current reset, never did that many a day. You really don’t need to add 10 grammar a day. It does not scale the same way that vocab does.

There’s only 120ish N5 Grammar points. That is like saying you would want to learn all of N5 in a two weeks. Less than double that for N4 and N3. It just does not seem like the right strategy. You seem like a dedicated learner and should already have a decent grasp of Japanese given your previous Anki and Japanese experience.

I recommend turning ghosts to minimal and scaling back the amount of new grammar you learn per day to between 3-5. My strategy for when I was trying to really focus on grammar (you alluded to having certain times of focus and periods of maintenance) was to keep my reviews around a set number. For me it was about 40–some say 50–maybe for you it’s 100. What ever the number that does not overwhelm you when you use Bunpro.

Do you reviews until there is 0 Reviews left. Check the forecast and if the reviews are less than your number in the next 24 hours, learn more grammar. If it is higher hold off and repeat the first step.

This helps you pace yourself, learn in bursts, make steady progress, and not burn out. Really think that this is another example of poor user onboarding @Jake where the site can start to feel punishing for certain kinds of learners. Especially those with previous SRS/Japanese Experience.

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#18

Thanks for the advice!

I did many cards per day in the N5 and N4 area as I know many of them through immersion and early textbooks attempts.
If you exclude grammar, my knowledge in Japanese is somewhere around N2 level. I’ve read nearly 1000 news and a few books in Japanese. So I know a lot of stuff through immersion already.

I now just reached a point where immersion just doesn’t really work anymore and therefore I want to fix my weakness with grammar. Textbooks don’t work for me, therefore Bunpro, that works. The N3 level stuff is by far harder for me than N4 and N5 and I already saw that five per day (my typical ratio for N4/N5) is tiring.

But the main problem are the short intervals. The amount would be totally manageable for me with 24 hours as minimum. But if you have to break up your reviews into multiple sessions per day because it piled up so much and then you get the wrong cards again and again and again on a single day, the review pile up in a crazy way.

E.g. I had around 220 due cards on one day but had to do 390 reviews to get to zero. That’s completely insane! And it takes hours to complete.

My main problem was also that I couldn’t do all reviews for a few days because I just didn’t have enough sparetime. And then I ended up in a SRS review hell that I never experienced in that way in Anki. The main problem are the short intervals because they turn everything into a Sisyphus like work, where you see no end. You do a lot of reviews, a new hour begins and the counter goes up again and it seems like you achieved nothing. That’s extremely demotivating and frustrating.

As this seems not to be fixable by myself (i.e. editing the intervals), I’ll have to turn down reviews like you suggested. The reviews for today are already down to 150 (240 yesterday), so I seem to get out of this nightmare after having invested countless hours this week.

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#19

Absolutely, I would love this feature.

I’m also behind on reviews, currently sitting at 310. It does feel a bit hopeless as I try to get the number down. Like you said, each hour piles more on me.

The only way I stay content is by adjusting my goal to putting in a certain amount of time or reviews per day.

But even before I was behind on reviews I mentioned on the message board a while back.

I much prefer having a set number of reviews in a day so that there’s a concrete finish line, even when I’m not behind.

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#20

I honestly don’t understand how you guys have that many reviews😭I left for like a year and only came back to like 300 (just n5/4). I didn’t add any new grammar until it was gone but that only took like a week maybe 2? of 10-50 a day with minimal ghosts on. For now I’m just adding 3 or so per day and it’s staying under a daily 20. I only do them once a day

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