So I have recently come back to Bunpro after several months off and I have a backlog of about 388 reviews. I have completed all of N5,4, and 3 and was working my way though N2 and had studied around 110 grammar points. This isn’t my first backlog and last time I battled through it, it took several weeks before it got down to a reasonable daily level. This time I have set Ghosts to minimal and just reset them, but I am wondering if it would be best to reset main reviews as well. I definitely need to review many of the N2 points I studied previously if not all of them but I would rather not reset all of N2. So I am asking the community, I tried searching about managing backlogs, but didn’t find any helpful returns. The advice is appreciated!
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I had a similar decision to make on WaniKani, and ultimately (after searching through their forums to see what others had done) I decided to reset down to a certain level (not all the way back to 0).
The main point of decision for me was that I was finding slogging through a(nother) giant review pile painful, rather than just tedious. I was losing motivation! Previously, SRS had been fun, but now it was becoming a dreadful chore.
So, I wanted to regain the fun of learning Japanese (via SRS) and that ultimately was what tipped the scales for me.
And, after resetting, it was a huge relief, and it did become fun again.
Re-learning an item you learned previously (even if you went all the way to burning it) is waaay easier the second time around, and doesn’t require nearly as much cognitive load as learning it from the first time. You will quickly advance to the point where you are starting to get challenging items again, and then you can slow back down to a nice, sustainable pace.
In other words, working through a pile of remembered reviews is much more enjoyable than working through a pile of forgotten reviews!
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I find resetting here isn’t that dreadful. Either you are still quite familiar with the grammar point, and you can just check your understanding on one or two of the example sentences before adding it to your reviews, or you encounter one where you’re not entirely sure anymore and you can take as much / little time as you need with them. I don’t recommend resetting anywhere with artificial barriers like WK, but here, you can go through the entries as fast / slow as you want, and you could even just look through the entire grammar list and start by adding everything you are very sure of again first, and only then work your way through the rest of the N2 entries again at a leasurely pace for example.
Whatever you decide, best of luck on your studies!
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Ah, that’s a good point. Here you can go to any item and click “I know this” to ‘burn’ it, or ‘Reset’ to send it back to 0. There’s not the same artificial leveling restrictions as on WK.
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I had a huge backlog after a long break and ended up resetting all grammar points other than N5. I originally just went through and reset individual points, but I quickly realized that some grammar points I thought I knew well I actually didn’t know very well at all. So I just reset to the beginning of N4.
This reply explains exactly why resetting all of N4 and N3 worked for me:
It didn’t take as long as I thought to get back to where I was, but I was no longer overwhelmed and I understood the grammar much better. So maybe resetting all of N2 would work for you!
But, like others have said, one of the nice things about Bunpro is that you can reset individual points. So I understand wanting to go that route instead. In that case, I would reset anything that you know you have trouble with, and also possible reset anything under a certain SRS level (beginner and adept maybe?) since those are likely not cemented in your mind anyway.
Good luck with your studies! 頑張って！
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