Why do I suddenly got bombarded with 80+ reviews?

Bunpro
#1

I really want to like Bunpro, I do, but it has been the worst learning experience of my live. Why can’t I decide when I want to reviews without going through the cram interface - which doesn’t allow me to save a list, and is really hard to choose which one I want to review?

For instance, for the past three days I keep getting 20+ reviews of words that are relatively new, and I was fearful that there were a lot of words and grammar points that I haven’t seemed for more than a week, then suddenly I am slammed with 80+ AT ONE GO. How can I control the frequency of when I can see seasoned and expert grammar points?

#2

Cause that is how SRS works. The idea behind it is to minimize reviews by increasing the time between them. If you remembered a word for six months, it’s unlikely you will forget it anytime soon.

Roughly, it’s 10 times your daily new lessons after a while. Could be much more if you keep failing stuff, could get even higher if you have automatic ghost creation enabled.

3 Likes
#3

I don’t have automatic ghosts created. Why can’t it be like Anki where I can set my review frequency base on my confidence level? When I see my accuracy for a word or grammar point tanks, I just get more and more demotivated.

What are some best practices for people like me who just can’t seem to get it? Bunpro feels like a test which I keep failing and failing again, but it’s preferable to Anki just because of its structure and system.

#4

I don’t have automatic ghosts created. Why can’t it be like Anki where I can set my review frequency base on my confidence level? When I see my accuracy for a word or grammar point tanks, I just get more and more demotivated.

I love seeing words I know because it’s so easy and fast. And I hate seeing words I don’t know, because I have to really think hard and struggle. With enough attempts though, words I don’t know become words I do know.

Don’t be demotivated by failure, failures are the bricks that make up the road to success.

What are some best practices for people like me who just can’t seem to get it? Bunpro feels like a test which I keep failing and failing again, but it’s preferable to Anki just because of its structure and system.

I prefer bunpro to anki largely because the typed answers forces me to be more honest with myself than a self assessment of how well I know things. But if you don’t think you’ll cheat yourself, you can always turn on reading mode. You still can’t choose the frequency of each word individually, but you can self assess if you knew the word.

Personally I have ghosts turned on, because I love the extra practice on challenging words, but ALSO, you can quickly create a study deck of your ghosts in cram. It’s essentially all words you’ve missed in the last ~3 days.

How can I control the frequency of when I can see seasoned and expert grammar points?

You can create a cram session of them by srs level, and work through it at your own pace. You don’t have to do them all at once.
But I’d argue you’re probably better served waiting for them, and just trying to engage with the sites Graded Readers. Look for the words you know in a more organic environment.
The main point of an srs system is to study without wasting time studying words you already know. Words you get right you see less often then words you get wrong. I don’t know why you’re so eager to see the words you already got right 6 times in a row. If you feel you don’t know your high level words that well, you can increase the level loss from getting a word wrong, to make sure words aren’t high level when they shouldn’t be?

Hope some of this helped. Best of luck!

4 Likes
#5

Just do fewer new cards. That’s really all there is to it. I agree that there is a lot about the SRS algorithm that would drastically improve if they made it work more like Anki, but they’re resistant toward changing it.

1 Like
#6

I have been stalling my process. I do new cards like once per week. That’s a total of 7 new cards per week and yet I am still feeling overwhelmed.

#7

How do I do that on mobile? All I got is an interface to add cards from a big list of words, and under Special there’s only grammar, no vocab

#8

I don’t think you can on the mobile app. But with the mobile browser you can easily do it.

You can also make cram sessions on the browser (mobile or pc) and then work through them from the unfinished section (cram) on the mobile app, if you prefer to work there.

#9

It’s confusing to me that you’re overwhelmed by reviews and also want to cram. Do your reviews, and cram if you have extra time.

When you want to do extra, and you still have reviews, do reviews.
When you want to do extra, but have no reviews, you can cram, learn extra words, practice reading, listening, etc…
When you can’t manage to keep up with reviews, save some for the next day. Don’t add new words until you’re caught up.

It will regulate itself.

You will improve over time. If you aren’t improving fast enough to meet your goals you can always spend more time learning. 80 reviews a day isn’t such a large number if learning Japanese is a major life goal. But it’s definitely too much is if you only have 15 minutes a day to study.

1 Like
#10

Stop adding new cards until you catch up. It’s that simple.

Sometimes I’ll go a few weeks without adding anything new, it’s not the end of the world if you allow yourself to not bite off more than you can chew.

5 Likes
#13

image
get to my level of suffering hahaha

(i know its torture, i have been at this two time per day for one and a half months now and the numbers are not going down 🥲)

I also hate some aspects of how Bunpro is doing this. Many people have already complained how annoying it is that they combine multiple grammar points and forms before someone has a fundamental understanding of the grammar point first.

1 Like
#14

I’m around 200+ / day so i use pomodoro to handle it tbh but this is how SRS works and I havnt found anything as efficiant to learn a language so, i guess itis part of it !

#15

Thanks for selling me off Bunpro.

Learning should be empowering and building confidence in the students, not demotivate them to the point where it is like an endless abyss. I am getting off the Bunpro train and finding another method. Should be a good time to probe the depth of Anki

#16

I am going to try to address some of the points brought up in this thread. There are a lot of points here so forgive me for writing something so long!

As others have mentioned, this is how SRS works. Other SRS services also function the same way, with many not even offering the ability to do something similar to cram. Anki does have a system a little similar to cram which allows you to do extra reviews, but based off of this thread it may not be what you’re after either.

You can make a custom deck and then can cram that deck (it needs to be set to “Learning” to show up in the cram options). You can also bookmark grammar and select to filter by bookmarked grammar from the special tab. It is also possible to filter by SRS level from there as well. Hopefully that helps a little.

This is due to how the SRS works. If you do your reviews all at once then they will tend to come back all at once as there is no “fuzziness” to the Bunpro SRS, only fixed intervals. We do plan on adding FSRS (the same algorithm that is used in newer versions of Anki) as an option for vocab so this may be what you’re after.

If you go to Settings then Reviews and then scroll down to Advanced, you can find a variety of options for adjusting how the SRS behaves which includes the size of the intervals and how strict the SRS is when you fail a review.

We plan on adding some new easy sentences to the beginning of many grammar points to help deal with this. Although technically any of the grammar used in grammar review sentences will have already been taught via the Bunpro order we are aware that people may want to see the simplest use of grammar a few times first so hopefully the new sentences will help with that.

What I do personally for SRS is just do a fixed amount of time per day. If you do do this method then it is best to do reviews before new material. If you have too many reviews for the time then it means you don’t have time to do more material, which stops you from trying to learn too much too quickly, so things will naturally balance out over time. This method massively mitigates the issue of getting slammed with reviews from doing too much new material.

It is also fairly common that when starting SRS people learn a lot of material and then it starts to come back and feels overwhelming so that effect will play into things. This effect can happen with Bunpro, Anki, or any SRS.

Of course, different people will prefer different tools and it is also possible to learn Japanese without using SRS, which may even work better for some people if they dread doing their reviews. Some other people love grinding reviews. Similarly, some people love learning by reading, others by listening, others by conversation, etc. As this stuff is very personal I would suggest just trying things out and working out what works for you. Hopefully Bunpro fits in there somewhere for you, especially once you’ve played around with the settings a bit, but if you think there is anything specific we can do to improve then we’re always looking for feedback from users. Japanese is really tough to learn so we’re always looking to make it feel smoother (but still effective).

Hopefully you can find what works for you! :muscle:

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#17

That’s all good, but the core problem is the fact that the sentences presented are randomly chosen from a set of each grammar point. Increasing basic form sentences will just make it more likely for them to pop up, but will not eliminate the appearance of complex sentences while you are not ready for them. The suggested solutions were to identify the additional grammar points used within these more complex sentences and make them unlockable in a way that if the underlying grammar points reach a certain level, then the sentence gets unlocked. (Something like guru level on WaniKani) On top of that, it would be nice to say these grammar points listed somewhere for reference when failing such a complex sentence.

I highly recommend doing this! That’s what i do too deal with the huge amount of vocab and grammar. Shit happened in life to me, and I got burned out(work) and I kinda dropped out of everything in life except work, duh, and I piled up over 3k vocab on Wanikani and 4-500 reviews on Bunpro. I just started preparing for the JLPT, so I am doing 45 min Wanikani, 15 min bunpro each morning and evening, and have been doing so for ca. one and a half months. My vocab has gone below 500 for now, but my grammar is barely moving. I guess 15 minutes is not enough to make a real dent in it.

1 Like
#18

The sentences actually appear in a fixed order, going from generally easier to harder. The new simpler ones we are planning on adding will appear for the first few reviews. For vocab, the sentences also have N-levels attached to them, which you can check on the vocab page. The grammar used in the grammar review sentences should only include things previously taught in the Bunpro order, so it is up to the individual how quickly they want to push ahead and if they think they’re ready to.

Good luck! That’s a real mountain :mount_fuji: