Clear not the Review pile, but the Apprentice Pile

[polv]

How do you clear a backlog of reviews? What is your idea? How do prevent a backlog?

As for me…

Goals / daily goals

• Descending-level reviews of 50 per day
• Ascending-level reviews of 50 per day or more (like 100 per day)
• All new Kanji lessons at once
• New vocab lessons of 100 per 4 days (I do 50 per session)

Important tools

• Real Number - With high backlog, 42+ tells nothing.
• Cigar is OK (no “close, but no cigar”)
• Bad Kana is OK (no “even Kana”)
• Edict defintion
• Keyboard shortcuts
• ‘F’ to open vocab/kanji details
• ‘ESC’ for Ignore button
• Reorder Ultimate, not the other two ordering scripts
• WaniKani Override duo
• Ignore button
• Mistake delay
• May also use WaniKani Double check to directly change T->F and F->T

Reorder ultimate is a must, because it aids in visualization:-

When will I be released from agony? But I don’t want free days either.

///
PS. I have just returned from one-week’s vacation, where I do minimal reviews, while still continue doing Kanji and radical lessons.

[Goutye]

I delayed my leveling by 5 days, allowing me to put down a stack of 700 reviews when I came from vacations. 150 items of the stack were actually apprentice 2 items, so they came back the day after and the day after after… So from 700 I went to 400. Next day 600 to 300. Next day 450 to 200. Then 350 to 0. Something like that.

Leveling is great, but it’s useless to level up if you cannot take the new lessons in the same day of the following one. You will just end up messing with your memory. In your case, 400 is pretty easy to put down in 3 days. You can delay your leveling by 1 day, and push the batch of new lessons by one day. With that you should be able to catch up but you have to spend a few hours a day

If you level up, don’t start to learn the new ones before putting down low enough your stack of reviews and lessons. Take a little break, especially at this level. 4 days level is the biggest mistake I ever did.

Good luck! I just put down a 400 reviews stack today o/ You can do it as well!

[Usagipot]

Review number has to be +42, It’s meaning of life and is not even supposed to make any sense or be useful.

[polv]

Thinking about it… It is better not to clear leeches, not to target near 0/0 early on. Instead, use reorder to prioritize higher levels instead.

And try to bring down the number of Apprentice first. Probably below 200. (Currently 520.)

The effect is… the number of review will go HIGHER at first, though, due to the returning of Burns and Leeches.

[LankyAusMan]

It seems like your goal is to continue leveling up at a high rate, regardless of your review backlog. In which case, keep doing what you’re doing.

Personally, to be at a manageable number of reviews each day, i would recommend never doing lessons unless at 0 reviews, and ideally not doing more than 20 or so lessons a day. This comes at a small sacrifice to level speed, but makes it much more even and doable. Levels with this method still average something 8-10 days if using reorder script, and less than 14 in most cases anyway.

[kaz]

For me, it’s good to clear all of your lessons first. If you can’t, try doing a few each day. The rationale is that when you do your reviews, the newly queued reviews will end mixed up with your regular reviews, that way you can better remember those reviews because you see them more often.

[polv]

Maybe I should plan to clear all Apprentice first. As I realized, the number of review doesn’t matter that much, but the number of Apprentice does.

And even if I do the Apprentice, it would come back within 4 hours, 8 hours or 1 day (or 3 days), anyway.

EDIT: I misread it. Yes, I should clear the lesson first, although I sometimes keep Kanji at that level, and vocab level-1; and the number of lessons is usually around 50-75.