Advice for getting back on the wagon

I think this screenshot speaks for itself.

This all started when I had one day where a couple hundred reviews popped up in one day, and I just happened to be too tired to feel like doing them thanks to a full time job I had recently started. They kept piling up and the bigger the review pile got, the less I felt like trying to tackle them. Several weeks later now, I’m drowning in them and am just feeling a little overwhelmed in trying to get caught up. I know I’m probably going to fail a lot of the reviews since they’re long overdue, which probably doesn’t help my motivation.

But I bought a lifetime subscription during the latest end of year sale, so I’m not going to just give up now! :joy:

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General tips:

  • Doing them all at once is satisfying, but will lead to spikes of reviews in the future.
  • A lot of the recent stuff will be forgotten, so it’s pretty common to just reset a couple levels removing those items off of the review queue and letting you take them again as normal lessons.
  • Apprentice items will probably churn in this review pool as you clear them out, which will probably prolong the time to clear the stack and end up overdue depending on your pace and luck.
  • Sorting by SRS level to target mature items first will not only help clear the stack faster at first, but is also a confidence booster since there’s a lot more wiggle room on enlightened items than apprentice. Consider this if you don’t want to reset at all.
  • Soring by WK level (from low to high) makes it a bit easier to find possible reset points.
  • I really like the Pomodoro Technique.
  • Lawyer up. Delete facebook. Hit the gym. 100 apprentice items (or your preferred level) before starting lessons back up.
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Roughly 1000 of the review items are master or enlightened SRS level items (723 of them are burn candidates) with only 88 apprentice items, so would resetting a couple levels really help shrink the pile all that much?

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Probably not to an appreciable degree in that case, but it really depends on how you feel going through the stack. Since it’s only been a few weeks you might be fine without resetting at all. Level 26, maybe 25 content will probably be the only troublesome content and the decision to reset is more of a preference thing anyway. If your accuracy ends up painfully low on a given level it might be easier to reset a bit just to relearn those items, but if you’re comfortable working through it don’t bother.

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Mostly master or enlightened - yeah, I would probably be doing my burn candidates first (gradually, a couple sessions a day, maybe 100 reviews a session or so), and then moving on to the master items - ones you pass will get out of the review queue for quite a while (or forever), and even if you fail, they’ll go to a guru level, so at least a week or two before they’re back in the pile. That should help bring the numbers down to make the apprentice/guru reviews appear more frequently and feel more manageable.

It’s a lot of reviews. It’s hard. But, all you really have to do is persevere and the numbers will go down.

Good luck :slight_smile:

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I was in that same situation some weeks ago, stuck between levels 26 and 27 with 2100 piled reviews. I can definitely relate…

I didn’t have the scripts for prioritizing certain items over others, so I went with the raw, default review system. But doing otherwise might be a good solution to clear your queue faster.

There aren’t many tricks to it: gotta dedicate a couple or few weeks, without doing new lessons, until that pile goes down and your Apprentice + Guru numbers look good.

Since most of items in your case are higher up in Master and Enlightened, you might be positively surprised by how much you remember them!

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Wow, congratulations on having that stack be mostly items in higher levels of knowledge!! It’s overwhelming, but I bet you not to get discouraged. You can do this!

Sometimes I remind myself that I am trying to learn 10,000 Japanese Vocabulary words and my learning method merely serves it to me a little bit at a time, but they are ALL the waiting to be learned. A little bit at a time.

I love the advice given to you by the others above. I never had a stack bigger than 500 (yet), so I haven’t tried re-ordering scripts.

If it were me, I would slam my account into vacation mode right away, and spend my Japanese study time for several days just going through the Level lists (where it shows every radical and its name; kanji and its name and reading; vocabulary and its name and reading) and clicking on any cards that make me say, “Huh? I don’t recognize that one at all!” to review the way I had planned to remember it. I used that process to bring me “back on the page” after taking a month-long break to deal with a family crisis.

Then I jumped back in, and started chipping away. Asterlea recently (can’t with a great attitude) worked her way through a review like yours just a bit at a time a few times a day.

If I were you, I would be slamming it back into “vacation mode” between review sessions to keep the moment “frozen in time” as much as possible.

In order for the SRS to do its job of coming back in 4 hours or 1 day, it’s better if you can get through your stack in one day, which is not possible with so many items… For this reason, it seems like the above-mentioned reordering scripts would assist your brain by re-serving the items that require that shorter recycle time. I’ve never tried them.

Good luck, MidnightSkies! I’m rooting for you! :muscle:

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Sadly since posting this I haven’t gotten caught up. The number has grown to a whopping almost 1900 reviews and for pretty much every review I have tried I’m completely blanking on the reading or meaning (or most commonly both) since I’ve fallen out of regularly checking WK and I’ve forgotten so much already. At this point I’m heavily considering just resetting levels until the review pile is gone since I’m sick of feeling intimidated by the huge review pile and just watching it grow bigger every day and feeling like a moron getting pretty much every review wrong after being away from the app for just a few months. I just haven’t felt like doing WK (maybe just because I’ve fallen so behind on reviews and the almost 2000 review pile makes me want to cry) so it may just be for the best that I just reset and maybe put the app on vacation mode until I get my head back into learning Japanese.

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Honestly, that may be for the best. :slight_smile:

I would recommend a complete break for two weeks in order to reset your self as well. :wink: Stop worrying about it for a while and you can come back with fresh eyes. :+1:

Your profile says that you joined at October 2021, so u basically go almost as fast as the system would allow. It depends on alot how fast you are with your reviews, and the highest review peak starts when the enlightement items start to shuffle aswell into your deck. And without strategy, ur not playing your cards right imo. Learning japanese is a endgame goal, so you want to build a lategame-battle-control-deck. The most important thing for this is that u survive the mid- until the lategame, since that´s the core strengh, but if ur too greedy, u get easy overhelmed by your counterparts, the cardspammers. They try to defeat you early with a rush-deck so your hp drops zero before u even reach the lategame. U better have a battlefield-clearspell and some defenseaugements, because those few cc-spells wont do enough at this stage anymore, and we all know that those pesky rush-decks are broken and meta since 2016.

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Jesus christ. I had a similar issue back in 2017…and I’ve only now just got it back down because I gave up for 5 years. My suggestion depends on what kind of memory you have. If you have a good memory maybe just do 100-200 a day or twice a day if you can. Otherwise, if you have a bad memory like me or just left it too long, try dropping down a few levels. I had 1000 reviews to get through and dropping down made it 500. It was worse since I had a bad memory, the apprentice reviews went up to 300 which meant that even if I powered through the entire 500 I’d have another 300 due in 24 hours.

Annoyingly, I had just succeeded in levelling up and getting my apprentice reviews under 100 but now I have covid so the reviews I have to do is 200 atm.

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I’m honestly not sure whether I have a “good” or “bad” memory. Back when I was pouncing on lessons and reviews as soon as they were available (i.e., back when I wasn’t working a full time job), I was doing pretty good with retention and consistently getting like 90+% correct on review sessions, even when the session had like 100+ items at once. Now…well, I’ve since broken my habit and haven’t reviewed a lot of radicals, kanji and vocab for like over 2 months, and it seems that’s done a number on my recall for a lot of stuff. The review sessions I’ve done recently were like around 40-60% correct. I’m failing vocab reviews because I’ve forgotten one or more of the kanji in them, even if they were ones I Enlightened or even Burned a while back. Likewise for kanji; I’m forgetting them because I forgot the radicals they’re made up of…radicals I supposedly should know because they’re either in the Enlightened or Burned stage by now. It just feels like everything’s been thrown out of whack. What possibly complicates things is I’m just now remembering that a lot of the reviews on my pile are for Enlightened or Burn candidates (ya know, material from a bunch of levels ago), so I’m not sure if dropping a few levels would even help.

I almost dropped a couple of levels just to see what would happen, but the confirmation email from WK reminded me that if you feel overwhelmed, you can always just keep chipping away at reviews and the SRS will eventually sort things out, and now I’m second guessing that decision. I’m just not sure what would work better for me at this point: push myself to do at minimum 100 reviews a day and hope I get back into a groove until eventually the pile is gone, or just reset until the pile’s gone and basically start over kinda fresh. I kind of wish WK would show you how many lessons and reviews you’d hypothetically have if you chose to drop to a certain level, that would help with the decision. Part of me is worried that if I choose to reset and shortly after put the app on vacation mode, it’ll just make it all the more easy to basically give up and never come back to it, which I don’t want to do. Maybe I should just sleep on it and see which route I feel like taking tomorrow. I’m tired right now after work and not in a particularly optimistic or motivated mood, lol.

I just got out of basically the same situation. I think (Can’t remember now) it was over 2000 reviews. All I did was completely cut-out new lessons and do a hundred or so reviews per day. But even then, I had a bunch of… extended pauses. My original goal was to get here before January 1st, but I didn’t actually reach 0 until just a couple weeks ago.

Just keep slamming through the reviews and ignore the number. It doesn’t matter. Do as many as you feel like, then do that again the next day. The most important thing to remember is that a little adds up to a lot over time, and you don’t want to do a lot at once anyway, because then they’ll all boomerang back at you at once.

The nice thing is that spending a couple months purely on reviews, no lessons, gets easier as you go. You will get VERY comfortable with all of the existing reviews and be able to blow through 100 in a short amount of time.

I’ve only just begun slowly adding new lessons again, and I plan to take it much slower from here on out.

Even after resetting back to level 10, I found I was still stumbling on the few hundred reviews I still had, so I just said “screw it” and reset all the way back to level 1. Guess all that’s left to do now is try and pick up the pieces and start over with a clean slate.

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