Feeling supppper discouraged lately. I accidentally let my reviews pile up literally -once- when I went on vacation like a year ago, and I haven’t felt like Ive been making ANY progress at all because since then. Ive basically just been playing catch up and not feeling like I’m -actually- reviewing things or getting new lessons done.
The problem is that there’s just no realistic way I can conquer 900 some-odd reviews in such a way that they won’t just build back up again by the end of the day.
Ive resorted to doing 50-100 reviews at a time and then putting it on vacation mode between sessions until I FINALLY get caught back up, but is this really a good idea? My session averages have been absolutely abysmal as I’m practically re-learning material at this point and it’s super frustrating. Is there a better way of coming back from such a situation, outside of spending 2+ hours grinding reviews every day and/or resetting my account back a handful of levels?
Also side question…are most people seriously able to maintain 0 queued reviews on a day-to-day basis? If so, how much time are you investing into WK every day on average? I feel like I put in anywhere from 30-60 minutes daily, but Ive been straight up STRUGGLING trying to keep my head above water…is this not enough? Any advice?
The only thing I can think of is to reset a few levels, even say back to level 15, 16, or 17. I’m sure you learned most of that content since you’re level 20 now. As you said, anything you review now will pop up again soon and you’ll have the overwhelming reviews again.
Resetting by a few levels might help you feel like you’re making progress again because it’s like a fresh start to really jump back into it. That’s what I think anyway
That would help with your backlog, and any leftover items will probably be so easy that you go through them extremely quickly.
Yeah, I think so because if you don’t disappear for a year or so then it’s a lot more manageable to just keep it up daily.
For me, I usually do reviews 4 or 5 times per day (sometimes only once though but that’s not ideal!).
I have 100 reviews-ish per day, it’s more than doable. I was doing 150 per day at one point and it was still doable.
Keep in mind that as you do more lessons and add more items to your review pile, you’re also hitting guru / master / enlightened / burn on old items, so those items are essentially removed from your reviews for a certain amount of time (forever once burned). So it becomes manageable and not overwhelming.
WK now has a function to order your reviews according to WK level, i prefer ordering by SRS level with a userscript, but both work.
the problem with getting a very large pile of reviews is that it disables one of the main functions of an SRS system: you want to review failed items sooner, and items you got correct later. but if there’s (for example) only a 1 in 10 chance that you’ll get a failed item in the next review session, that doesn’t work.
when your review pile is much larger than the number of reviews you can do in a day, you need to get the SRS to work again somehow. and that’s what sorting your reviews does.
so re-order your reviews, and then do a set amount of reviews each day (say, 100 per day). it’ll take a while, but once you get down to where you get through the whole pile each day, then you start adding new lessons.
yes! the WK system is designed to operate best when you do all your reviews every day. if you’re getting more reviews than you can manage, you need to do fewer lessons at a time.
This is what I did recently, and it’s worked great for me so far. And if you still have quite a few reviews after resetting but don’t want to reset more, or if you don’t want to reset in the first place:
Personally I used the new WK review ordering option, but userscripts work too
50-100 reviews at a time is fine, but I strongly advise against putting it on vacation mode between sessions. When you put it on vacation mode like that, it pauses the SRS, so your reviews will come back all at once. So it’s essentially like doing all 900 at once. If new reviews come in between sessions, that’s fine, let them, your review count will still lower eventually.
Yes, most of the time. Not in the last 6 months (when I was in a situation like you’re in now). But ever since I reset I’ve been able to keep my reviews down (granted, it hasn’t been long). And before 6 months ago I was able to. If you do your reviews every day and don’t do all your lessons at once, it’s a lot easier to get reviews down to 0 every day.
I don’t pay attention to how long I use WK every day, but if I had to guess I’d say around 30 minutes a day? Maybe less?
I just came back from about a year long break as well and had a big stack of about 700 reviews to climb from. It took about a month for me but I finally got reviews back down to zero. What I did was exactly what some other people have recommended: reordering. I didn’t know WK had a reorder by SRS level option now, I just searched around for a userscript that did it. Sort so you’re reviewing your lowest SRS level items each time, that way if you miss it and it needs to be reviewed again it doesn’t get lost in the pile.
Coming back from this is hard, so make sure to not burn out as well. Set a pace you can keep to, and don’t let the huge number of reviews psych you out: it will come down! For me I did about 100 to 150 a day in one session; personally I don’t like reviewing multiple times a day if I can help it.
I do this occasionally, especially overnight… or on days when I know I’m going to be super busy… just because it helps my peace of mind.
This would be a good reason to reset a level or two. You can always look at WK stats and see where your pink (Apprentice) and purple (Guru) items are. Given your situation, it might just be better to reattack these after resetting.
Going forward, you’ll want to keep your Apprentice item level under a manageable level.
I do all available reviews at least three times a day, I don’t know how long I spend on reviews every day but I’m guessing it’s around 40 minutes?
I do spend a lot of time on the lessons though, making sure the mnemonics stick/making up my own mnemonics, 5+ minutes per item when it isn’t vocab I already know.
WOW this is so helpful- thanks everyone! I had NO idea you could re-order your reviews in WK order, this is making the reviews a lot more bearable and really makes me feel like Im making progress as Im getting caught back up to where I was.
And so basically, if Im understanding this correctly…if I find that Im being overwhelmed by reviews, I should just hold off on the lessons, right? That should buy me time to commit the other reviews to memory and eventually burn them before adding newer material into the mix. I guess my perfectionist/ADHD brain is was obsessed with getting 0’s across the board, which resulted in me cramming lessons in a bit too quickly and not retaining enough while simultaneously beefing up my review workload in the process.
I think Im going to keep putting it on vacation mode between sessions at LEAST until I get caught back up, but then I can revert back to SRS order and chill out on the new lessons until my daily review queue is more manageable.
One last question, and I assume there’s probably a thread on this…but everyone keeps referencing user scripts, which seem like they could be really valuable for individual learning styles. Is there a simplified guide anywhere in the community that explains some of these?
if WK were a car, lessons are your accelerator. unfortunately, WK doesn’t have any breaks…
so yeah, manage the number of lessons you do every day. many people use the number of apprentice items as a sort of speedometer, and stop doing lessons if the apprentice items go above 100 (or some other number). i just do 10 lessons a day, works out for me and gives me plenty of time for other stuff.
I still try my best to maintain it.