I got up to early N3 grammar before I took a looong break. I’m talking months. Maybe since around October of last year? I doubt I’ll be able to remember many of the grammar points, so should I just restart? I have a backlog of 2000+ reviews, as well. I’d hate to lose my progress, but it’s possible it’s no longer any good to me anyway and I would just be frustrating myself trying to cut through it. However, if it’s better for me to just power through it, I’m willing to do it.
Thank you!
I’m a big fan of resets so I would say go for it. It won’t take as long this time around anyways.
There is no unified truth to learning a language. You have to find your own way. All people can do is recommend stuff by telling you the upsides and downsides based on what made you quit in the first place:
Restarting will give you immediate progress but will take more time in the long run since you learn stuff that you already know. Why did you quit the last time? Was it because you were discouraged because you didnt feel like you are making progress? Then starting over might be the best.
Continuing and powering through will make your immediate progress seem slower but, if you power through succesfully, will give you a nice head-start for your future studies. If you quit simply because you lacked the time to properly study, and you have enough time now, then powering through might be better.
My suggestion, since you probably still remember quite a bit of those 2000+ reviews:
Lots of work but less work than starting from zero. Also gives you a solid assessment of how much Japanese you can still mentally access
General recommendation for SRS systems is to not reset. That doesn’t mean you have to do everything in a day. You don’t have to keep to the daily schedule until things are back to normal. Just do the reviews as you can. The SRS will sort out what you remember and what you don’t. I would go against the other suggestion and say to turn off ghosts entirely. They are not necessary in the first place. I would say, however, it might be good to change the SRS penalty to half your levels instead of one level.
If you get something wrong, look at the entry, and read it. Just keep doing that.
And take it at whatever pace you like.
You really don’t have to feel the pressure of finishing everything all at once or even very quickly. You’ve already taken the long break. A little extra time on those reviews ain’t gonna hurt anything.
This amounts to a similar process as a reset, but leaves out a bunch of potentially unnecessary re-reviewing, and uses the SRS system to figure out what you need to review, same as it did before.
I did something similar with Wanikani a while back. I took a break from using it for about a year and had quadruple digit reviews. I didn’t reset. At one point in the process I think I had almost 2000 gurus. I’d do it again. I got back to my previous knowledge in the space of a few weeks instead of the months it would have taken with a reset.
I think it’s important to keep in context why I’m suggesting to turn them on, specifically minimal ghosts: to have a full list of things that were forgotten on screen. Which in Bunpro’s more “forgiving” implementation of the Leitner system, wouldn’t otherwise be well visible (unlike in Wanikani). Then use the ghosts to take further actions. You could instead argue to change SRS strictness for the same effect, but I think the overall way Bunpro is designed, works surprisingly well with forgiving strictness. Hence use ghosts as a “hack” to have a list of forgotten terms after being done with the 2000-review pile.
Right, my suggestion was more saying that increasing the SRS strictness and disabling ghosts, and then just letting the SRS do its thing is probably more efficient. Even with the fail-twice criteria I think it could result it a bunch of unnecessary work. I mean we’re both getting at the same thing.
in the end we are getting to the same thing. My suggestion of enabling ghosts over increasing the SRS strictness results mainly from my (ungrounded) assumption that OP would end up with at the very least 800-900 SRS-1 items otherwise 
with ghosts, they can decide themselves how to handle those
If you’re motivated enough to go through 2000+ reviews, do it. If it feels like you’re hitting your head against a wall, then resetting might be worth it. Ultimately, do what you find motivating.
If you do reset then you can set the starting SRS level to Adept or higher. This will make all the stuff you forgot sink to the bottom, and expedite the stuff you know rise up.
You will remember more than you think.
In my experience going from the level of N4 to N3 is where you start moving out of the fundamentals and more to real world usage. There’s a decent bit more complexity, synonyms, similar kanji which can be frustrating to sort through. I’ve never “reset” an app, but I have moved across 4-5 different apps which reset my progress during this time period.
If it motivates you…
I’m still above 4k+ reviews. I have around 2k in Adept, which means I’d have to do 500+ reviews a day to get the number down to zero. On a good day I can get 200 reviews. It takes around an hour to do 100 reviews.
The grind shall continue.
N.B. I am doing the reading mode at N2 and N1 vocab. I average around 70-80% accuracy. This is a very different experience from writing and output.
Ouch, it hurts, but I can totally relate 
Welp, the pile is not going to thin down itself.
If you feel confident with N5/N4 levels you could always reset up to that point and reset the more recent grammar/vocab you’ve started (N3). If you want a clean slate for reviews then you’d need to do a full reset. I’ve done this myself and it is very relieving to say the least. Mentally speaking, when you see that many reviews to tackle it can be a great demotivator and cause serious burnout. You could always try a partial reset to see how you do and feel, and if it’s not working as much as you hoped you can do a full reset. Hope this helps!
Where is this setting for limiting the max number for the daily queue size?
I am under settings → reviews and I must be blind because I don’t see it there.
Inside a Review session, click the cogwheel in the top left then navigate to the Queue Order tab - you should then see the Session Review Limit option 
