My reviews got crazy and I also took a short break for 2 months, i’m failing many words that have now made my apprentice pile over 250, i’ve stopped doing lessons but my reviews hover around 500 and honestly i’m just getting into more of a 50-100 reviews MAX a day vibe so I don’t rage quit this system, but i’m wondering if rolling back a few levels would be worth in this scenario?
I try to go with a 100 max apprentice before I start learning new things but this pile just isn’t budging soon
I think you should stop doing lessons until the review pile is back to a manageable level. A 500 review pile isn’t that big if you don’t feed it with lessons. Powering through should be doable. Resetting would be an overkill.
I’m not planning on doing more than 50 to 100 reviews a day tho, for my sanity, so is SRS going to take care of the rest for me if I keep that pace up or will my reviews just stay in limbo or continue growing?
If you’re not doing lessons and not failing them all, it will work eventually. There’s nowhere else for those reviews to go but up to the longer stages.
In fact I would say a manageable number per day is preferable to the whole stack at once. The problem with the latter strategy is all the NEXT reviews come at the same time and you’re back where you started.
Not quite as bad though, because they would be divided in different review stages, hopefully. But still a problem
Alright I guess i’ll just persist, when I came back I went from 100 apprentice to now 250, obviously alot of leeches or whatever those are called? So i’m just slowing down and trying to relearn them instead of being lazy about them. I guess with time it should smooth itself out.
The pace you plan for is ok. The key is to stop doing lessons. The SRS will delay reviews so the pile will get lower and lower until it gets manageable. The only way to get a growing review pile is if you add to them by doing lessons.
In that case, to make it a lot easier for you, go to your settings and make it so the review order is from earliest levels first. That way you clear through a lot of stuff first that is older/ easier/ longer intervals.
If you pass them, then they will get long review intervals and you won’t see them until after you catch up. If you miss them, then you’ll see them soon again since they’ll be prioritised and that makes the relearning faster.
And then eventually you’ll get to the most recent levels and even if you forgot a lot, you’ll see them again in 1-2 days and relearn them. If at some point you are missing all of them you could look at that level and reset to it, but you don’t need to, you can just review the notes as you go and eventually you will clear the pile. Then change the settings back to the random order as that is better for normal use.
Whereas with the random ordering right now, you’re probably missing some, but not seeing them for a while because other cards get ahead, and some of those get missed, plus more cards come in adding to the pile each day. Even without lessons this can make your pile get bigger as it turns into a lot of items that you might remember after 1-2 days, but because there are 500 items, you don’t see them for 3-5 days, which crushes your accuracy.
I hit level 37, and suddenly I couldn’t recognize any of the 800 kanji I had supposedly “burned” up to then. I have stopped doing lessons so that my review feed is just restricted to stuff I theoretically already know. I also discovered the “resurrect” button at the bottom LH corner of the kanji screens, which puts burned items back into your review list at the “apprentice” level; in other words, you are starting from the beginning with these characters again. I have had to “resurrect” more than 100 kanji that had been in my “burned” list. Really discouraging!
Forgetting is totally normal. Burned doesn’t mean remember forever. It means WK torture is over for that word. If you need the word in the future, it will work itself out. Have faith. 
I do ~20 extra study burned reviews every day to combat this.
Nice tip, I never messed with the ordering because I was scared of straying from default or “intended” but that makes sense to me, will try that. Thank you