Skipped 7 months any suggestions how to restart?

Well I finally had the courage to check today and results ?!? It’s been 211 days since I last levelled up which means this was the last time I actually did any reviews. I have over 2400 reviews and 70 lessons. I don’t know if I remember them should I just butt in or should I look up or study some before breaking the algorithm? If anyone asks I didn’t put WK in vacation mode or anything else this was not planned and don’t ask how it happened I don’t know, life I guess…

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You’re gonna get a lot of varying answers to the Reset Question. So I’ll give you my story and you can consider it but I wont flat out say “this is the way.”

I was level 27 or so and took a two year break. Granted I had been reading a lot and didn’t give up on Japanese at all. So I looked at my burns and what level I had absolutely ZERO reasons to revisit. Whatever level is less than 100% comprehension, start there and work your way back up. I am essentially reviewing things but its material I am not 100% confident in.

TL;DR Find the latest level you have 100% confidence in and the first one that less than that you should reset to.

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I don’t have experience with long breaks or resetting, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt: but the SRS can still do its job without you resetting. You’ll get wrong what you won’t remember, and you’ll get right what you do. (If you’re concerned about burning something by accident, and you didn’t actually really remember it, you can manually unburn it on the item page, or install the ‘double check/undo’ script, or just be fine knowing you’ll likely see it in native material to help reinforce it later anyway.)

The biggest thing I’d advise is to not do any new lessons until you have a good handle on your reviews. It’ll take time if you decide not to jump back any number of levels, but if you’re needing any inspiration/motivation, there are many threads on here of people who got in your exact same position and have shared/are sharing updates on their progress as they smash through those reviews. :slight_smile:

Other bit of advice would be, if you decide not to reset, is to do the reviews in smaller batches, to try and spread things out, so you don’t get massive chunks again all at once.

頑張ってね!

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I never took any long breaks nor did I reset, so I don’t have any experience to share.

But what I probably would do is just take a look at level 29, look at the items of that level, the radicals, kanji and vocabulary. Do you remember them? Most likely, because they’re the most recent items, you’ll barely have any recollection of them at all. But the further away you go from the point when you took a break, the more you should remember.

So now take a look at level 28. If that’s no good, take a look at level 27. Eventually you should reach a level where you should remember the majority of the items. To that level I’d recommend resetting.

Then you can start chipping away the reviews, a good portion of which falls away from the reset. Your accuracy should be decent at least, making the experience not too excruciating. And the next few levels will be easier, good for you to get back into the flow, and motivate you by giving you the objective of surpassing the level you had once reached.

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I speedrunned to level 60, took a four month break, forgot everything, reset to level 46, and have been slowly working my way back through the giant review mountain ever since.

Don’t worry too much about “the algorithm”. Just keep studying and you’ll get there eventually. My own review pile has gone down from ~5300 to under 2000 over the last year.

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Thank you everyone :smiley: with all your suggestions as a conclusion i’ll check the latest level that I remember most and work my way up from there. I might reset if it gets overwhelming.

@l_l I am a little perfectionist I’ll probably try to finish all my reviews in a short amount of time :sweat_smile:

I started about four years ago, made it to level 20-something, visited Japan for a couple of weeks, lost all motivation for a year or so, had a very long break, reset back to the beginning, made quite good progress, then had another break due to ill health, but didn’t reset all the way back. It took a while to get back into a rhythm, both times, but I think it was for the best.

I’d suggest resetting like one level back, since you likely won’t remember all of the current level, and the previous level will probably have faded a lot. Don’t go any further than that unless you find you’re failing a lot (like much more than half) of reviews for those levels.

The benefit of resetting back (just a bit) is the stuff you’ve forgotten goes back in the lesson queue, and you get the benefit of flipping through the lessons, taking your time, and doing the little quiz, which I found helped a lot when I’d completely forgotten the previous level.

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