Managing Workload

Bunpro
#1

I’ve been trying out Bunpro to help supplement my grammar/vocab review. So far, I do mostly enjoy it, but I do have a question about managing the workload.

I’ve been using WaniKani for kanji training for a few months now, and my strategy has been to keep the number of items in Apprentice under 100; if items from Guru+ reset, then I won’t be bringing in anything new and focus on what I’ve already been reviewing. This strategy, so far, has been working quite well for me, and I’d like to think that Bunpro should work the same for me using it this way.

Are others using a similar strategy here, and if so, what do your backlogs look like?

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#2

I usually try to go for the same on WK, but I’ve found that in reality, so long as I do a consistent amount of daily new lessons, I’m always below that limit anyway (or above, when I did too many). I think it might be worth trying to find a healthy amount of new lessons to do every day rather than focusing on how full the SRS stages are, because after all the only thing dictating how full the stage is, is how many new lessons you do each day. This is assuming that the amount of items that get knocked down some SRS levels is somewhat consistent, because your amount of new lessons should include some headroom for those items that might drop down.

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#3

It’s very, very easy to accidentally do too much and build up a huge review backlog in Bunpro.

Where I have personally found success is studying from a textbook and using Bunpro is a supplemental material to review what I learned from the book. When I study something from my book I add it to my reviews in Bunpro and review it later when I have time, and after going through a few review cycles I retake the practice quizes in my book to test my knowledge and if I do poorly than I research accordingly. I also keep all of the grammar patterns in a text file and feed it to ChatGPT in order to have it generate quiz questions for me - it’s really good at testing you in points which are similar but have a slight difference in nuance, and then explaining why your mistake is incorrect.

I’m very, very bad at gauging how much to study per day, but thankfully the book I use manages that for me and cutd everything into a period of 45 days and tells me what to do on each day.

My personal rule is that active studying or immersion are more important than reviews, so if I still have some reviews in my queue but don’t have enough time to do everything than I don’t beat myself up over it, I’ll leave some in the queue for tomorrow and go read or something instead.

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#4

To be honest, I’d expect that trying to manage WK reviews manually can be a bit overwhelming (especially as you add more learning tools to the mix). It could also potentially be a bit repetitive as WK has it’s own system for feeding new items to users. I really like how you are providing a limit, but perhaps instead of focusing on the SRS count (as @Flutter noted) limiting the number of daily lessons may be more helpful. You can actually limit this in the WK settings! Super helpful if you haven’t taken a look at that. You can also adjust lesson batch size.

My methods for Bunpro… are pretty chaotic. I just have a fixed ratio that if I do x number of reviews I’ll do y number of lessons immediately afterwards. The ratio is different for vocab vs. grammar. I wouldn’t really recommend this at it means the more reviews you have, you add more lessons. Typically you’d want to reduce lessons the more reviews you have. Sometimes I add more new lessons if I feel like doing that.

I’d be a proponent of what @rururun suggested - guide how you use your Bunpro grammar by following a textbook path. Something they didn’t mention is that Bunpro actually has Decks (it might be under Beta testing so you have to opt in?) where you can follow textbook paths!

#5

Maybe I’m missing something, but why exactly can the advice for WK not just be transferred over to Bunpro? I’ve been doing a set amount of grammar and vocab lessons every day and it’s created a very consistent workload for me, the only times I don’t do new lessons is if I feel I’ve completely forgotten the grammar points from yesterday and I should relearn them instead of doing new ones.

I think the best advice is always just, if you wanna manage your workload, find a fixed amount of daily lessons that work well for you. This also depends on how often you do reviews and how many you get right, so I think this is a process of trial and error on both Bunpro and WK. You start with a fixed amount, try it out for a while, and see if it’s too much or too little. Then you adjust. Anything else will inevitably lead to inconsistencies that will mean your workload will be too high or too low at some points.

#6

when I was doing the grammar lessons, I aimed for 50 in apprentice and stopped adding anything if I had 20 or more ghosts. I found this to be a decent load since I typically add 10 or more grammar points at one time and then grind them creating ghosts along the way. you can easily become overwhelmed by ghosts if you aren’t carefully managing how many you have while adding new lessons.

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