The obstacle my past me build for me

Bunpro
#1

Hey Guys,

to be honest I neglected Bunpro for a while without activiting the vacation mode.
Because of this I came back to over 2500 reviews.
My review form was just the translation type, not the Fill In Type.
So, after a month of painstakingly get my vocab reviews to zero, at least once a day, I changed all of my learned Vocab to Fill In.
Now I every time I do a review I get the payback for lazy learning.
I had less then 150 words in the beginner interval, but I’m sure at the end of this day it will be over 250.
It’s interesting to see how bad my vocabulary learning skill actually is.
Thanks for listening to my struggle.

Did somebody else had to go through the same struggle?

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#2

Ooof, 2500 is intense!

When I first started on the journey, I got started with WaniKani, then I got distracted by something shiny and didn’t come back for a year or so. At only level 3 in WaniKani, I came back to a few hundred reviews, and felt completely lost, so I just reset my progress and started over. Since that time, I’ve met with a few distractions and restarted the journey a couple times, but this time it’s feeling real for me. I just recently hit the point where I have done more reviews in the last 6 months than I had for all 5 previous years combined in WK, not to mention starting Bunpro as well to start learning grammar in addition to vocab.

Not quite the same as your struggles with the switch to fill-in, but in a similar vein, the thing that I had done at the beginning that kept causing me trouble later on was giving up too quickly when trying to recall an answer. I’d get the prompt, try to think about the answer for 10 seconds or less, and then give up and reveal the answer. More recently, I’ve been trying to give myself a minute or so to recall something if I feel like it’s right on the tip of my tongue, and that has been feeling much more rewarding or effective when I get it right. If I got it wrong but still felt like I was close, then I would wait for it to come back around and try a second guess before revealing the answer, which is also something that I had never previously done. I have found that probably less than 25% of the time, I get the answer on the second try, but even just trying to think hard about it has been motivating in its own way… It shows me very clearly which ones I don’t know as well as I think that I do.

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#3

Translation and Fill In are 2 very different skills so being good at one doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be good at others.

I hope this thread is comforting. 4,000 Reviews

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#4

Somewhat, though not quite to that extent. I ran into a stretch where life interefered with Japanese learning - in a good way, just too much good stuff happening to sit at the computer. So I came back to about a thousand reviews here - and close to the same on my Anki decks that I use to get better at Kanji recognition. I reset all the Anki decks back to zero, and gritted my teeth for about a week and a half to get through the backlog here.

I had the same response. I couldn’t believe how much I had lost. The first spins through the reviews had me despairing a little. Nothing like getting fewer than 10% correct over and over again to get you down.

But here’s the good news. I also couldn’t believe how quickly it came back. It only took a few SRS shots to get the current reviews back in my head. I’m now back where almost everything feels like it did before I stopped. Just like riding a bike. (まるで 自転車 に 乗る? No, wait, that’s not how idioms work…)

I think you’ll find that as you get through this hard part, it will get better…

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#5

well five days later, the reviews just keep on increasing.
now I increased my beginner interval word count to almost 450. It feels like every word I touch gets slowly passed down to Beginner 0.

Of course I don’t have the right learning technique. I know that.
Also english isn’t my first language, I consider myself fluent, but the small nuances are hard to get right, especially when it feels like you know three words with “same” meaning.

I will keep on fighting as I make 1000 reviews or more daily.

#6

I think you put too much on your plate. If I were you, I would reset my progress and start all over, and I have actually done that in the past. I’m happy I have - I feel my grasp on the “repeated” points got stronger, and it was less stressful than what you’re going through.

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#7

Oh bois, 1000 fill in reviews per day is borderline madness for me…

I have regularly done 300 - 500 translation reviews daily, and sometimes it is quite hard already, maybe slow down a little bit?

#8

There’s a new feature that lets you order your reviews so that your least overdue items come up first. It’s helping me work through a large grammar-only pile slowly and surely.

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#9

You can probably reset all the items that are at the beginning level and learn them again. If you have dropped doing reviews before getting to at least ‘adept’ you didn’t have enough exposure to them.

#10

I know resetting would be the best course of action, but the agony of seeing my progress disappear, in one go…
I will keep it up for a while, before I make that decision.

#11

But you’re saying that due to your review stack, you’re getting things wrong. So isn’t your progress disappearing anyway?

I have a baby and currently I get about 1 hour free time per day (which I usually spend with my wife). As a result my pile is getting quite big too (currently around 1300 reviews, but it was getting up to 1700). What I have found useful is to just chip away and do some reviews whenever I have 5 minutes. I make use of the cram feature (which only seems to work on mobile for some reason) so if I got something wrong, I can drill it a little before it comes round again. This has shaved a few hundred off my daily queue.

Personally, I am more interested in grammar than vocab, so I am trying not to worry too much about how big my vocab queue is.

I won’t lie though, a lot of what is in my pile I already know reasonably well, so most of my review crunching is just moving things gradually to higher tiers.

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