Or should I say, one way to do it, but it worked for me. Maybe it will help someone else.
Background: So I took a trip to Japan, in which I took the JLPT N5 exam. I had studied quite a bit for it, and after it was over, I felt a little burnt out. I decided to take a couple of weeks off studying as a reward. Then, life happened, and a couple of weeks turned into longer than that. I lost the habit. At some point, I just avoided it because I knew my review count was not going to be pretty. In any case, 7 months later:
Ouch. Well, best thing to do is just buckle down and do it, right? Well I did about 50 reviews the first day and my accuracy was so terrible it was taking forever. I did about 80 more the next day, same thing. So I came up with a new plan. Here it is.
Step 0: should go without saying. Do not do any more lessons.
Step 1: Enable vacation mode immediately. I didnât actually do this because in my case after 7 months, every single review in the system was what we call at work, Riding On Time Now (ROTN, pronounced ârottenâ). But if thatâs not the case, the first thing you want to do is stop more things from going into that stack. The next step is going to take a while, so in the meantime, make it stop getting worse.
Step 2: Donât just start going through the reviews. You canât anyway if youâre in vacation mode, but even if you could, thatâs the VERY slow way. Youâre going to do the slow way, which is faster than the very slow way. DO get the Self Study script, youâre going to need it.
Step 3: Configure the self study script to only quiz you on level 1 items. Itâs probably going to be very easy. Do it anyway. When you can get a high accuracy on that, change it to level 2 items and repeat. The first many levels go fast; I got through level 10 the first day. It will slow down as you approach your actual level. I was doing a level a day toward the end. Note: the higher the accuracy you demand of yourself before moving on, the more time itâs going to save you later. Spend the time now to make it good.
Step 4: Once youâve done your actual level with high accuracy on the self-study script, NOW take it off vacation mode and start powering through the reviews. Youâll actually have a chance of passing most of the reviews that way. Get that stack to zero. It will take a while, maybe several days.
Whew!
Step 5: Youâre not done yet. STILL donât do new lessons. You need to wait and let this number
get down to a reasonable number before you start adding more, or youâll just get right back into trouble again. Most people say less than 100; Iâm using 20 just to make sure Iâm really out of the hole with not too many leeches.
Step 6: Ok NOW start lessons again. But ALSO, use that self-study script to go over your burned items, because you kind of cheated by reviewing some of those recently before the burn review. Thatâs ok, you had to do it. But go back and make sure you know them when you have a chance.
Hope that helps someone. Itâs slow, but way faster than just beating your head against a stack of things you donât know, and WAY faster than doing an account reset. It took me about 2.5 weeks, with only 2 days of that being actual official reviews.
Thoughts?
on clearing the review pile. Mine wasnât quite as large, but just as satisfying to see that zero.