Over 200 Ghosts for the first time

Japanese
#1

I’ve sat on my PC all day today. This is what my Grammar stats look like. Usually the first round of reviews now takes over an hour, so it’s a little bit of a stinger to do 240 reviews, split in two sessions, spent the time on the first half and then find you have more than half remaining, since you end up doing the new hour reviews. I ended up having a break down the other day because I broke through that barrier that you go through when challenging yourself, that barrier being when your brain is burntout and then the real learning happens.

Any tips people have used to speed up memorisation apart from clicking through the cards until the same one appears twice?

What do people do hear when they make a mistake, other than check the answer, make an attempt to memorise it and then just ‘next question’?

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#2

You got way too many in beginner and ghosts are set to start at the default beginner 3? You can adjust the starting levels for ghosts. Perhaps consider having less of both and studying those points cleanly

7 Likes
#3

Bro you have more Ghosts than items learned?
You have to stop and redo your lessons.
It is clearly not sticking.
Set a limit: max 30 ghosts and than you stop adding new things, till the ghosts go down.
I would advise to keep the Adept level items under 40 (max 50). Beginner under 10. Not more than 3 new items per day.
You can´t brute force learning a language. If you try, you will fail and stop. There are more than enough threads on all of the various Japanese learning forums, where people wanted to speed run and just flew to close to the sun and burned out.
Speedruns never work

14 Likes
#4

Had no idea you could set limits on Bunpro. That would have helped a lot. Is there anywhere you can set it?
I suppose if you are born and raised in Japan, you have no choice and you are somewhat forced to learn the language. That’s my take on it. Let’s not start on the speedrunners, such a nasty corner of language learning that’s been created.

1 Like
#5

You can see ghost options under settings → reviews → advanced and then play with the minimum SRS part. But yeah as the others said, there is probably something to fix regarding how you’re using Bunpro. Maybe stop adding new items until your ghosts are back under a manageable threshold ? Assuming you’re going with daily x new items in your queue and not manually adding anything, taking a few days off new material won’t be an issue

1 Like
#6

Did you learn speaking in a day or two? It took years. Japanese kids learn the 常用漢字 in NINE years!

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#7

Hi there !

at this point I would suggest you to reset everything if possible and set a limit for ghosts.

having 200 ghosts is really counterproductive…

I understand you want to speak the language quickly but this can’t be the best way for your brain to assimilate all that data.

5 Likes
#8

For me, it’s not about my brain assimilating the Japanese, my brain must conform to the Japanese, it’s not going to do that until I break it. I have to go over that boundary.

There is no inbuilt tool to limit ghosts, so I have to do the work to keep on top of it and reseting and thus losing all my work would be the easy way out.

#9

If you have this many ghosts, I recommend doing some immersion and taking a break from Bunpro. I think SRS is just a tool for learning, and if you’re stuck this far down in the weeds with SRS ghosts, that’s a symptom that you’re going too deep with SRS and not understanding the points well enough to progress further. I recommend solidifying your current understanding through actual reading and listening (simple native material or material aimed at learners is good), then coming back to eliminate the ghosts because you actually understand them (not through brute force as you’re currently trying to do).

4 Likes
#10

Honestly you can just delete the ghosts. Frankly, ghosts are overkill as far as memorization is concerned. You’re already dropping an SRS rank with each wrong answer. I don’t think they are necessary. SRS already handles lapses by its design.

It’s okay to use this site as you see fit. Are you really benefiting from reviewing and re-reviewing the same points this much? Bunpro arguably already has too many SRS steps. Everything you’ve learned at the point you currently are is very basic and will constantly be reinforced by other means.

3 Likes
#11

You can click on ghosts from the dashboard and delete them individually. That way you don’t have to reset your progress.

It sounds like you’re trying to cover a lot of ground really fast. For me, that leads to a state of churn, where I superficially memorize the content for the short term but then don’t make much progress because I added too much new content. Then adding new items starts to interfere with what I learned previously.

I would suggest trying out more active learning strategies and try to connect it with what you know and build an intuition for Japanese language structure.

This is what helped me:

For each grammar item you get wrong, try looking it up on youtube and watch all the videos you can find for that item.

Create a claude system prompt with instructions describing a Japanese tutor and ask it to analyze each wrong answer.

Write out your own sentences for the grammar point, along with your translation. Ask claude to check it for errors.

Have it verify the answers by looking up sources.

Migii and satori reader are good companion apps that fill in for shortcomings with bunpro.

Also check out tadoku graded readers and try to spend as much time reading as you do on learning apps.

2 Likes
#12

This sounds like a good idea. Whatever software uses the SRS model, the amount of support you get understanding what is wrong varies. Bunpro is not bad in that it gives you pointers when there are similar grammar or vocab, or you forget a little something or you happen to answer something that is an alternative. But still, if you get it wrong, I’ve heard categorically from devs, there are no plans to change the system or to make more intensive reviews, other than the cram option they have.

Anyone should know though, that you have to drive stuff in so hard until there is no possibility of getting it wrong, because the language is you. It’s the same in school, teach one grammar point, for a few days, but drive it in. No Software I’ve found so far, will bother with that critical stage.

Dare I say, they won’t because getting you go round and round in circles, means you spend more time on their software. Let’s just be thankful that a lot of Japanese learning applications have oughtright purchase options, let’s hope.

Also at the end of it, what do you memorise? The correct answers to the cards, or how to conjugate correctly? Slightly shady isn’t it.

#13

I would say that it’s pretty categorically untrue that you need to “drive this stuff in”. Language learning does not happen in apps or textbooks, though I’m a proponent of both. It happens with exposure to native speech and writing. What these learning tools do is give you little hooks to grab on to things. They provide little pieces of comprehension that your brain uses to learn more thoroughly when you read and speak and listen. You can use this app as much or as little as you want. You can use it how you want, because endless ghost reviews is in fact not the only way to learn a language. For example, just because you failed to produce a grammar point in a review does not mean that you wouldn’t recognize or understand it in the wild. The fact is, every piece of grammar you learn in this app, you will learn one way or another with exposure to the language.

6 Likes
#14

I gotta say, your approach to learning sounds like it’ll drive you straight to burnout pretty quickly. Of course you’re free to make your own choices, but it just doesn’t seem manageable in the long run. You brain doesn’t need to be overloaded to learn stuff, rest and low efforts periods are just as important to make sure things stick long term.

5 Likes
#15

I wouldn’t say speed runs never work, but the people who succeed are either:

  1. People who can successfully motivate themselves for 4+ hours a day. That’s very hard if you’ve got work, school, family, other things in life. Even 1 hour a day is a very big commitment.
  2. People who overfit for JLPT.
  3. Actual prodigies, which is exceedingly rare.

Language learning, especially Japanese which has kanji, is largely a function of time. There’s effective and ineffective ways to use time, but it’ll take time nonetheless.

#16

@ICantSpeakJapanese, I have to agree here with @prolezone. Language learning is very different to learning at school, it’s not practical to just “drill in” each word to permanent memory.

Language learning is much closer to learning to memorise the first 1,000 digits of Pi than learning 3 methods to solve quadratic equations. The individual complexity of items is relatively low (and N1 grammar point / vocab isn’t much “harder” than an N5 equivalent, just less frequent and more nuanced) but you are learning a huge volume of them.

The question I would ask is: How can you verify that you’ve drilled in a word, so that you remember it in 6 months, 1 year or even 2 years? The only way to do that is to test yourself that you’ve remembered the word at a given a frequency: maybe after 2 weeks, then 1 month, then 3 months then 6 months. And that’s what SRS is.

If price is a concern Bunpro has a lifetime subscription, but Anki is free and extremely powerful if you put the time into it.

As far as what you memorise - Bunpro has at least 8 example sentences for each vocab point and more for grammar. Most apps or even textbooks don’t offer this level of variety.

Even if you are just remembering the answer to each card, then you are remembering at least ~6,000 (8 x 800 grammar points) different ways to use the grammar points. If you can do that… Then you’ll have certainly picked up enough pattern recognition to use the language in real life.

#17

Otherwise I don’t use Ghosts at all. I think they’re a relative waste of time that caused me frustration. You’ll be fine if you don’t use Ghosts. The most important thing with SRS is to make sure you’re strict and honest when you get something wrong. Trust the SRS process.

#18

I turned ghosts off, I don’t see how they help other than give more reviews. Time spent doing ghost reviews could be spent reading manga instead which is more fun.

2 Likes
#19

Agree. Honestly out of the box Bunpro has pretty bad settings. You can change it, but you need to know what you want out of Bunpro which isn’t easy for beginners.

#20

This is more important with Anki than it is with apps like Bunpro or WaniKani, IMO. For those, in my opinion, it’s not necessarily a bad idea to be more forgiving of yourself in early SRS stages but set a limit for when you can use the undo button. I don’t let things go past Adept on Bunpro or Guru on WK without having it cold, but will always use the undo button for Beginner and Apprentice. This is because the early SRS stages on these apps are too frequent. On adept, if I get it wrong but the answer comes to me without hitting the reveal button, I don’t have an issue with pressing undo. All results in something that feels closer to the anki learning curve and prevents unnecessary reviews. With Anki, I do not mess around.

(One exception for the rule on WK is with leeches. If I’ve missed a vocab word 8-10 times, I’ll let it live in master/enlightened as a quasi-suspend. I don’t burn anything without knowing the answer straight up. I have less than five of these though)