When should I do my "failed" extra reviews?

I do my reviews twice a day, once in the morning, once in the aftenoon, full clear each time.

When I make a mistake in the morning reviews, it creates a similar review item immediately. For example, if I have 10 reviews to do in the morning and make a mistake on one of them, but finish the rest, I will immediately afterwards see 1 review waiting for me after I just cleared everything. This review is going to be testing the type of question that I just got wrong.

My question: do I do that new review right away, or should I wait until my next normal review session, like in the afternoon? What’s best for learning?

1 Like

It is a good question, and there are various opinions and scientific studies on this very topic (and there’s been quite a deal of research for decades on it). At the end of the day, however, each person essentially needs to determine what feels and works best for them, especially given other constraints like how much time they have to devote to study, as well as their personal aspirations (need to cram for a test or exam? more short term goals? long term goals?). Are you OK with an 80% average retrieval rate over the short term? Or do you need to pass a major examination (cramming for the JLPT or a university test) where you need a higher retrieval rate such as 90%?

Overall, current research seems to confirm that the best time to practice retrieving something from memory is when you are on the verge of forgetting it. It’s optimizing for this point that is not only most time-efficient for studies, but also allows you to solidify the memory long term.

I am also curious as to the inner workings of Bunpro’s SRS system. I think if you get something incorrect as new information, you should cram or drill it at least once or twice until you are sure you know it fairly well in the short term. Then you can wait until the end of the day or the next day to click on review.

The most important thing to remember, imho, is that more frequent studying/drilling of the same concept can actually be counterproductive to memory stability. More does not always equal better when it comes to how the brain commits things to memory.

Lastly, when studying similar grammar points, be careful to not overload with too many similar points all at once.

1 Like

What I do is to do it right away, but I have the ghost activated, so I have to review this lesson for the following days, with this method I reinforce the lesson that I have some difficulties.

I also tried to do the review as soon as they appear, so I spent the whole day doing some lessons and keep in contact with the language.

3 Likes

I could be wrong, but I’m not sure that this is the intended behavior (unless the devs intentionally changed it recently). I’ve been using Bunpro for like 18 months now and I only started noticing this happening in the last week or two. As far as I know, you aren’t supposed to see the same item again until its next SRS interval comes up, except in the case of ghosts, which in my experience show up at the top of the next hour after they were created.

1 Like

I think it’s a recent change, too.

I have ghosts on as PP mentioned, so I often see something again if I keep missing it, so I usually do it again at the moment to help reinforce it. But as someone else said, it’s really up to what works best for you.

Personally, I do it right away to reinforce the correct answer.

I find if I wait to redo the review, I am much more likely to forget the correction on subsequent reviews. If I redo it straight away, I am much more likely to remember in the future.

It’s definitely recent; I only started noticing it happening for me within the last few days. I’m personally not a huge fan since I like keeping my reviews clear, but they’re the same points I just wrapped up and I’d rather wait before doing them again. It’s definitely good practice, but I wish they were added to the next hour’s reviews rather than being immediately created.

@Kingkanjithemighty

Yes there should be no Review “immediately”.

Ghost creation was bugged, and we just fixed it (I believe).
But this feels like something different.

If you get something wrong, wrap it up, and then see it show up again straight away, please let me know!

Just did a round of reviews and wrapped up everything. Of the 8 items I got wrong and wrapped up at the end, 6 of them immediately showed up as new reviews. They were different sentences than the ones I just had, but they were the same items.