I took a break, what now?

[jprspereira]

@jprspereira

You have 2 options: to go through the pain and do the batch of reviews you have available or reset a few levels back. Which one is better will depend on how long you were away, your number of reviews, your level. Mainly, it will depend on your preferences. I’ll offer you my perspective on both approaches so that you feel more comfortable making a choice.

Go through the pain of doing the batch of reviews:

This one is as simple as it gets: success means seeing that 0 on reviews once again. For that to happen, you need to go through the pain of reviewing what you have available. I do have some suggestions:

• Don’t do any lessons. At this point, trying to force new knowledge to get into your head would be like trying to extinguish a fire while throwing gasoline at it. It doesn’t work. First, get your review pile back to 0. Only then you can go back to your daily lessons.
• Divide the review pile in smaller batches. Do 20, 50, 100 reviews at a time, throughout the day. Choose your number. Only crazy people cough cough will be able to face the whole pile at once. Choose the way that makes you less wanting to kill yourself.
• Following the same idea above, it’s also a good idea to spread your pile of reviews throughout several days. If you have a pile of 500 reviews and you go for it in just one day, all the SRS intervals will be synced. This means that those same reviews will come together in the future to hit you back. In my opinion, it’s much better to have a little bit more reviews for 3 or 4 days over having a giant pile do to in a single day.
• The script Prioritize Overdue Reviews Reorder prioritizes your most urgent reviews that need reviewing and shows them to you first. This is a good thing, as you’ll be able to focus on the reviews needing more of your attention first.

These are some ideas I have. Personally, I advise not to abuse the reorder by levels. Your brain might not know the difference between kanji A that is level 10 and kanji B that is level 40, but because you’re aware that you’re reviewing items level 40, your brain now knows which answer WK is looking for. You, however, didn’t know the correct answer without tips. So yeah, use it sporadically and only in extreme situations like this.

It’s time to reset back:

It sucks having to go back a few levels, but as we say, sometimes it’s better to take 1 step back in order to take 2 forward. The main question this raises is to which level you should reset. I have a solution for you: Self-Study Quiz .

The trick is to use this script to review items, level by level. The moment you find a point where you know less than you’re comfortable with is the moment you figure out which level to reset to. If you think you’ll reset around 10 levels, start with the closest level to what you think you’re comfortable enough. Don’t start from the very 1st level

Obs: If your account was created before the 5th of December of 2018, resetting to level 1 will reset some of the mnemonics that you might be used to. For more information, read the Content Overhaul thread.

From My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK 📖 ) - #2 by jprspereira