After taking an unintended several-month hiatus from WK and amassing 2000 reviews that I have yet to make a dent in, I’m finding that I’m failing a lot of them because I’ve since forgotten things that WK assumes I still remember at this point. I fail kanji reviews because I’ve forgotten one or more of the involved radicals, and I fail vocabulary reviews because I’ve forgotten the meaning and/or reading for one or more of the involved kanji. Especially annoying when the radical(s) or kanji that I’m assumed to remember have been burned and thus won’t show up in reviews unless I manually resurrect them. Basically, my long time away from the app has completely screwed up my SRS rhythm, and I’m having a hard time getting back into it.
I think it could be cool if WK could recognize when you fail multiple reviews that involve the same kanji/radicals and offer to take you aside and specifically review those things or offer to resurrect them for you if they’re burned so you can review them some more to refresh yourself. Though, I have no idea if something like that would throw a wrench into WK’s SRS system.
Thanks for bringing this up, I think what you suggest would be a great feature although I’m not sure how easy this would be to implement. Still, I’ll put it through to the engineers and see what they think.
In the meantime though have you perhaps considered resetting to a lower level? I reset my level from 35 to 15 after a 3 year hiatus and found it to be a much nicer experience to breeze through some levels I was semi-familiar with rather than get frustrated over a huge review pile.
We are currently rolling out the ability to sort reviews by Lower Levels First, which is good for helping reduce backlogs and leeches. As of yesterday, it is accessible for anyone up to Level 30.
(I think next week it will be accessible for everyone).
You can enable it in the App settings:
After a long time away from WK, it can sort of act like a self-adjusting “soft-reset”.
If you try it and find it useful, please let us know!
I’ve considered that, but it would be useful to know beforehand how much your review pile would shrink for whatever level you’re considering resetting to. I don’t know how far I’d have to go back to get my pile back to a manageable size.
I’ve finally decided to just do this. I don’t really feel like I’m getting anywhere trying to tackle the huge pile, only to fail over half of the ones I do each session and just have them added back to the pile a few days later. I don’t think changing the order of the reviews is really going to help here. I’m just feeling too overwhelmed by the sheer number of them, and I don’t really “feel” like I’m level 27 anymore when I’ve forgotten so much stuff anyway. Makes more sense to me to just reset and build my progress back up, and maybe this time I should go more slowly so that reviews don’t pile up as quickly.
Just out of curiosity, do you plan to add the opposite as well (current level first)? In my view, it’s good for getting new items quickly in your Reviews before you forget them (and of course for going fast)
Probably not anytime soon. We’d like to avoid building in any options that can unwittingly lead people into traps (runaway backlogs). We have some ideas for mechanisms that could serve as guardrails to prevent such problems, but that would have to be part of a much bigger change.
