You’ll get out of this.
The problem
What is currently happening - why you don’t get ahead: Currently items appear in a random order, so let’s say you do 250 out of 1000 reviews randomly. You’ll get some right - yay, you hopefully won’t see some of those until after you are caught up (pile gets smaller). But you will get some wrong. Some of those will come back for review in the next 24 hours (pile gets bigger), but you might not see them then because they all get mixed back in with the other 750 reviews plus 200 other items coming back around for review. Add to this that on some days you are busy and do fewer reviews than items coming back in (pile gets bigger). All these cards churn around, and items you miss keep getting missed because it takes so long to see them again with the random ordering. This makes it hard for the pile to actually get smaller because not only are you getting reviews coming in from the future, you are getting more reviews from missing items. Something you would have gotten right if you had seen it within 24 hours, gets missed (again and again) because you aren’t seeing it each time for 2-3 days.
What do you need?
Something to prioritise seeing items you are likely to get right and kick them to longer review intervals (pile gets smaller), and a way to see items that you miss during your catch-up right away so that they can also be relearned and achieve longer reviews (pile gets smaller).
The solution
The pragmatic winning strategy is often the following. I’ve done this here back when I used, it, and on Anki, and I’ve seen a lot of people use this strategy. It’s simple and effective:
- go to settings and set your reviews to come from lowest (earliest) level first
- this means in your case you clear your reviews in order from level 1 → 28.
- keep doing what you can, eg, 250 reviews per day, and even though more keep coming, you will start to win
- What does success look like? If you are doing 250 out of 1000 reviews, perhaps in early sessions you get content from level 1 - 15. There won’t be a lot at the very early levels because you probably burned it. So fairly soon the level range of your reviews will narrow, eg levels 14-17. And then after that the level will increase, e.g. to 16-20, etc. As the lower level items get to longer and longer intervals, your time is spent on later and later levels, until finally, everything is back up to normal review intervals.
- if you don’t start to see satisfactory progress after 2 weeks (twice your break time) and you’re getting demotivated, then reset slowly - level 27, then wait a couple days, then 26, etc. It’s normal to need to relearn the most recent content (e.g., the last 2 or 3 levels), so don’t sweat it.
- once you’re caught up, set your reviews back to the random ordering and then keep going until your reviews are down to a comfortable daily amount.
- Then you can continue with a lower lesson rate. If you were doing 10 lessons a day, now do 5, for example. There’s a lot to be said for the future predictability in reviews that comes from doing the same amount of lessons each day.
There are 2 nice features to this strategy:
- Earlier items are usually easy so you can get rid of them from your pile more quickly, and they will have longer intervals, so they don’t come back around again until you are caught up. This means the pile actually gets smaller
- If you miss items as you catch up - you’ll see those items again at the correct interval. Which is good because you’re more likely to then remember them, which will then kick them out to longer and longer intervals. Which means the pile actually gets smaller.
What not to do
Counterintuitively, vacation mode is generally not helpful in this situation unless you are genuinely not doing reviews. If you are doing reviews and you turn vacation mode on and off to do them, then what happens is that as far as the app is concerned, very little time has passed. So people who do that (let’s say in your case spending let’s say 5 days of real time but just a few hours of app elapsed time to get through 1000 reviews), they generally find that once they clear the whole pile, and then turn vacation mode off steadily, hours later they get swamped with a huge influx of all the missed items from the last (in your case 5) days coming back at once. Perhaps it’s helpful at the weekend, but I would argue don’t use it. It delays the time before you will be allowed to see items you just missed, and just makes it more likely you’ll miss them again when you finally get around to turning vacation mode off. I’ve seen some people go through painful loops on that and get frustrated. Rather, set yourself a realistic target for your weekday and weekend review counts, and just be consistent in what you do. If your pile keeps growing despite that, then you probable need to reset a couple more levels slowly as above.
Don’t do lessons (ever) until your reviews are firmly at zero.
Tracking progress
I recommend making a tracker of how many reviews you do each day, and what your total pile is. And you will see it gradually coming down.
I’m surprised there isn’t a collective thread here for people catching up? At any one time there are so many people catching up I would have thought it would be quite a party in such a thread if someone starts one.
You reviews have to go down eventually if you aren’t doing lessons and you are doing reviews. The question is just if that happens fast enough for you to stay motivated. If it’s going up after 1-2 weeks, then your current rate of clearing reviews is much lower than what you were doing before. In that case, you’ll probably benefit from resetting 1 level at a time as described above. But you don’t have to, it will work out to your new slower pace eventually.
You got this! 