Should I stop adding new Vocab every time I see it?

Bunpro
#1

Hello, over the last few months I started using native material to a much higher degree. Mostly reading manga, light novels, and playing games. I have a really hard time stopping myself from adding every new piece of vocabulary that I find into my reviews here on Bunpro. When I do skip one I often feel bad and like I missed out on a new word. But I am getting overwhelmed with reviews. Everyday when I wake up I have almost 400 Reviews. I do feel like I’m learning a ton but I’m starting to wonder if this is worth it.

So my question is, do you think it’s still beneficial, or even more beneficial, to not add everything? If so, how do you personally go about choosing what to study in your reviews and what to skip over?

One other question, I do you think it’s okay to move vocab that I see over and over and over again in native material into the “Mastered” level? I feel like this should be fine, but in a way it also feels like cheating.

Thank you so much for you’re advice!

2 Likes
#2

I’m new to Bunpro (and pretty new to Japanese) and I was concerned about setting too many items as mastered and never getting to review them.

I saw a reply to this post (Quicker way to Master Vocab/Grammar) that shows you how to manually set an items SRS level and I am so glad I found that! I’m much happier to set something to review again in a few weeks or a month just in case and I notice that you can easily un-master an item that way if you ever need to.

3 Likes
#3

Definitely not necessary to add everything. The problem can arise that you end up adding words that you’re not going to see very frequently. So even if you go through them with SRS you’ll probably forget them later anyway.

What I usually do is add words that I repeatedly encounter, but forget either the meaning or reading for. When I say “repeatedly encounter” I mean like I’ve seen it in 3 separate chapter books I’ve read and still can’t remember. It takes a lot of reading to know your problem areas.

If you keep having 400 reviews a day you may burn out. Just my two cents, obviously do whatever is making you happy. :slight_smile:

9 Likes
#4

which vocabulary I would add would be in this order
Jlpt → less than top general/novel 20,000 word → plot/story importance → anything else.

1 Like
#5

The question is, why are you reading so much material with new words that you get so many reviews? Either read something simpler, or read less. There is such thing as too much of a good thing.

Ideally, you should be reading material that has about 80% of things you already know and 20% of new things. Including grammar and things you are not 100% sure about. Set a goal of how many new things you want to learn, and stop reading when you hit that limit.

3 Likes
#6

I’d recommend adding the ones in the JLPT decks and not bothering with the others! And then if you see particular words coming up a lot add them too.
You could also play around with the setting and automatically start all new vocabulary at a higher SRS level if you’re already practising it by reading!

2 Likes
#7

I personally add them only if they fall within my next two upcoming vocab decks. For example, I am nearing the end of the N4 and I’ve already started adding to the N3 deck. If I come across a word in the wild and it happens to belong to one of these two decks, I’ll add it. If it’s from the N2 or N1 decks (or worse, the random decks), I won’t bother for now. Then hopefully by the time I do reach those decks, I have enough exposure to certain words that it’ll be super easy to recall and add to my reviews.

2 Likes
#8

I’m also at the stage where I still want to SRS every word, and regularly get too many reviews.

To avoid adding the whole dictionary, I’m focusing on what exactly I want to read without lookups.

E.g. right now that’s only 常用 kanji, and only words that come up in a couple of specific LNs that I want to read next. So I have decks for those LNs added as a backlog in JPDB (around 10k words). When reading anything else (bunpro reviews, wikipedia, bunpro staff posts etc), I’m only adding words from that backlog to active SRS (through JPDB-reader) and skip the rest.

This approach is probably difficult to implement with Bunpro vocab, since it relies on a browser addon and a parser API. But I hope the general idea “choose a focus for SRS” is useful. Ideally, for every word that comes up in reviews I’d want to remember which scene I got it from.

About “Mastered”, I feel like you wouldn’t be thinking about this feature with a more aggressive SRS scheduler. Bunpro’s current scheduler doubles review interval (e.g. 1 week → 2 weeks) when you mark an item correct, but JPDB’s scheduler increases review interval about 4.5x when you mark something “easy”. I think that’s more suitable for vocab (not for grammar). Perhaps it’s an idea to manually increase SRS level to 1-4 weeks for new words to decrease the load.

2 Likes
#9

Hmmm these are all some really great tips that really help me get a better idea on what to do moving forward. I guess I need to test somethings out and see what works best for me. Thank you so much

2 Likes
#10

I have the same issue with satori reader, I still have 1300 new words to do, and I try to do 20 new words a day :sob:

1 Like