How long has it been since you last studied? You are most likely best off not resetting. I reset after 18 levels after a 7 month break, and Iâm past where I was before but it took sooooo long and I knew a lot more than I thought I did. Just do 200 reviews a day, and youâll be back on track within a week. Better to do 1,000 reviews than restart and do 10 times that much. Good luck mate. You got this.
Hey there! Iâm also generally in favor of not resetting, unless itâs been a very long time since you last touched Japanese, Like a year plus. As a compromise option, you could always reset 1 or 2 levels, back to level 7 for example. The more recent kanji are probably the ones you forgot, and itâll decrease your review pile by quite a bit. Either way consistency moving forward will be the most important aspect of all (:
Hope this helps!
Iâll add another vote for not resetting, and agree with above. However, itâs also going to depend on what kind of person you are and how much failing will affect your motivation. Youâll fail a lot of items and that kills some peopleâs morale.
Look at the level pages and get a rough idea of how many radicals / kanji you remember anything about. The later levels you may forget most of and it might make sense to reset 1 or 2 levels down, but forcing yourself to try and remember on reviews is good practice. A lot of info will probably still be there. If you canât remember as you review then fail it and just consider that one you would have had to learn again if you had reset anyway. Also, if you have burned items you may want to review those to make sure theyâre ok. Youâll probably hit some of them that need some help. If one is really gone and needs to be studied you can reset individual items on their page.
I took a year and some break and came back to 1400 something reviews. It took me about 2 - 3 months (with a small amount of new stuff added) of doing about 80 - 130 reviews a day to get caught up again. Some days I would hit reviews where most stuff was known and I would burn a bunch of items, and other days I would be putting most back to apprentice. My accuracy dropped a pile for a while (fail a forgotten one, fail at some point while learning it again also) and that will make you have to do even more reviews. I remember thinking about how many more reviews it took to finally catch up compared to the initial batch, but it was good to see how much had either stayed or at least kept some information about.
This is a common issue that keeps coming up and you may see a variety of suggestions. Hereâs one:
- Set vacation mode.
- When you are ready to do reviews, undo VM, do your reviews AND set VM again!
- Repeat until youâre caught up.
The problem is you donât want reviews to keep piling up as you try to get your review pile down! And the lesson learned here, if you know youâre going to skip reviews for a while in the future; go on VM so you donât find yourself in the same situation 
Whatever you do, good luck to you and keep plugging away!!!
Wow thatâs a lot but not impossible
Ye thank you so much itâs been 1 year, so a lot of reviews but not impossible to catch up!
Thanks for the informative response!
Iâd say start knocking out the reviews and see how you feel. If youâre just failing every single thing and the kanji (guru and above) legitimately look foreign to you, maybe consider a reset because self-studying a ton of leeches at once can be a bit much. If you do 100 reviews a day you can get that queue down in a few weeks. My advice is to pace yourself because if you do all 1000 in one day, tomorrow youâll have 200-300 and next week youâll have probably another 400 come all at once, etc. youâll have these massive blocks of equally-timed reviews which might get overwhelming. At the same time, not finishing every review in a day is totally fine. If I have >300 I rarely do them all in a day. My average is ~100-200 a day max.
i noticed that i wasnât getting anything right and it was really frustrating. i was on level 20 and decided to reset. wasnt necessary per-se, but having surpassed my old level, id say i have a very very good foundation of basic kanji now because i basically learned them all twice. i dont regret it, but id say i have a lot of patience⊠going at a very dedicated pace, it took me from october to may to do 20 levels. just depends on how willing you are to spend a lot of time catching back up.
Depends on how much time and dedication you have. I just grinded 600 reviews today, I will finish grinding all my reviews either in 2, hours or tomorrow
only if you feel you genuinely remember nothing (which is unlikely to be the case).
i just cleared a 2400 review queue in a week and a half â after an unintended 3 months hiatus.
the thing that helped me most was to change the SRS priority (until you clear the backlog): if you change it to be âlower level firstâ - youâll see the easiest words and easiest kanji before the more complex ones. the more advanced kanji tend to be more nuanced and abstract, and the earlier ones tend to be more concrete and common everyday terms.