Firstly let me say how much I have come to respect the grind shown by everyone on this platform. It is my first post but I have certainly browsed the various posts and appreciate the (mostly) humble community, hard work and advice.
Japanese is not my first non-native language, I speak 3 others but I’m still nowhere near having a certain formula! Probably because every language I know have completely different alphabet/writing system!
Anyhow I recently discovered wkstats, and today marks my 77th day and subsequent arrival at level 10. I’ve largely enjoyed the journey so far and feel comfortable with my pace. However there is a definite hurdle that is not completely controllable.
Although it seems obvious, I have realised that there is a definite correlation between how my life is going and my progress on WK. A recent mini-domestic-crisis has completely derailed me. Prior to this, as I work from home I was able to do my lessons/reviews everyday, albeit slowly, but after this incident I stopped for 2-3 days and my latest review was a complete disaster!
I’ve been wondering what you guys think about breaks, self-imposed or otherwise? Have you gone on vacation mode and how was the experience upon your restart? Any thoughts would be welcome so please share.
If you aren’t comfortable with a full on halt, maybe just stop doing lessons and just do reviews until you feel settled
The longest break I took was 2 days so I can’t speak from experience, but unless your break is really long you should be able to come back from it within a week and feel like you’re back on routine ! Do what makes you happy
Personally I took a week’s break a while ago, I found that it was quite challenging to get back into it for the first few days since I had hundreds of reviews piled up and getting through them was a challenge, but after a few days of doing 50-100 reviews once or twice a day it was mostly back to normal I’d say, I’d say regardless of how bad coming back is, it’s better than trying to keep on top of reviews when you’ve got too much going on and burning out
IMO you should just slow down for a bit, like wkw said, just pause doing lessons for a while, and your reviews will slow down. Obviously you should take a break if you really need it, but fully stopping just makes it so much harder, because either your reviews will pile up, or you’ll turn on vacation mode and dread going back. Speaking from experience. Plus, you’ll feel better doing a little each day, instead of just leaving and then slugging through 500 reviews all at once!
As the old proverb goes:
“Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid only of standing still”
I had a month long break because of IRL. I think it delayed reaching holy land (level 60) for me for three months (or two if won’t count the break itself). What I worked out of it is the fact that before getting all water out of a sinking boat first thing you should do is plug the hole. Or in other words - I used vacation mod to clear my review pile by going into vacation mode directly after doing review when there were still a lot of pending reviews after I finished review session.
Also, I think - the longer the break the bigger accuracy decrease you will get. For example, after my month break my accuracy dropped from around 90% to 50%, but now I returned back to previous level of accuracy. It’s normal - because srs really works and breaking srs intervals will directly affect accuracy, more for lower levels items (because they haven`t sunk far enough into long-term memory), less for higher levels.
But long-term I think it may even help a bit because these way we teach our brain to not relay on precise srs intervals too much.
Do what makes you happy
for me for three months (or two if won’t count the break itself). What I worked out of it is the fact that before getting all water out of a sinking boat first thing you should do is plug the hole. Or in other words - I used vacation mod to clear my review pile by going into vacation mode directly after doing review when there were still a lot of pending reviews after I finished review session.