I’m in quite the predicament fellow Japanese learners: I was on a quick path, doing one chapter per week until level 48, and then well… I collapsed. It was too much for my small brain T_T
And it has been 6 months, only now do I have the courage to get back, and unfortunately well I have 5000+ reviews… I tried to check a couple of them and frankly, it’s bad, really bad. The kanjis are familiar but I can’t recall their meaning or even less their pronounciation…
So my question is what to do, the biggest problem about trying to tackle all these reviews is that they’re out of order, but resetting to level 1 seems absurd, as there are still quite a few kanjis I do remember.
Is there a way to have an idea of where I should reset? lvl 15? 20? It saddens me that all this work collapsed but I have to move on!
If it was me, I would try to see how much of that mountain of reviews I actually remember. It could be way more than you think. So that pile is going to drop significantly in number once you substract all the enlightened elements and master elements that are going to get rescheduled further away…
The kanji that look completely unfamiliar are probably those of the very last couple of lessons or levels you had done before stopping.
Everything else is still probably going to come back to you much faster than resetting completely to level 1.
You could try hopping back little by little, reset a couple of levels back and see how many reviews have cleared up, and look how well you remember the items of that level to see where to reset.
Yeah I would recommend strongly against resetting as Plan A. You’re going to remember way more than you think, or at least easily remember after one failure, and then you’ll be stuck waiting for level-ups and bored to tears.
If that turns out to not be the case, then consider cramming with the self-study script.
Plan C might be a reset, but even before that, I would just teach myself every level from 1 to my current one, a level a day or something*. Point being it would be at my own pace rather than subjecting myself to the level-up speed limit again from a low level.
* At my current level, that would be 28 days. Let’s double it and round up to be conservative. 2 months. A reset to 1 would take me 280 days, about 9 months to catch back up at my average 10 days/level. And I don’t think I would need 9 months the second time.
I’d probably recommend, if you don’t go the user script route, just setting a daily pace to stay ahead of how many reviews you still have incoming. Make effective use of the “wrap up” button to clear out items in digestible clusters, establish synonyms for items you got wrong after your long time away but realized you understood the nuance for (if you don’t feel confident about your judgment though you can scrap this step). When I had about 2400 reviews waiting when I restarted about half a year ago, synonyms & the wrap-up button were my best friends. Keeping everything into digestible sessions of like, 5 batches of 10 reviews here, 7 batches of 10 reviews there, to stay ahead of the incoming reviews will in the long run de-rust your memory while clearing out the pile better than a reset will, in my opinion.
The user script thing might make this advice irrelevant but at the very least I personally think some method of keeping your progress intact will be better than resetting. A little bit of elbow grease in the present will save you in the long run a lot of time and energy on this for comparably the same result.
Hey also, 5000+ seems like a lot. But it’s really not even a month at 300 reviews per day. It feels slow, but it’s way faster than resetting. Just don’t do any lessons until it’s all cleared out, because that will make it worse.
Also, don’t be me. Don’t do 3000 reviews in 2 days (lesson learned). It’s very satisfying, but guess what, now you’ve concentrated all of the RE-reviews in giant waves too. That’s no fun.
Thank you everyone for your kind advice! After testing out the cram tool, man there’s just too much I don’t remember, and trying to relearn without the proper order seems a bit too much.
I think I’ll reset to level 17, and start from there, it will definitely be a bit “easy” but that will probably help me with avoiding a similar burn out in the futur.
Trying to cram in lessons without an ability to SRS it, with such a large quantity is too much for my brain.
I did the self-study script method, but I filtered it to only level 1, then only level 2, etc. so it kind of went in a logical order instead of completely random.
The only thing I would change is, like I said, doing some number per day instead of a marathon sprint.
But people are different, my way isn’t going to be best for everyone.
