I’ve had a rolling average of about 90/91% for most of the time I’ve been going, lately it’s slipped down to 87/88% and HOLY OUCH!
You wouldn’t think it would make such a difference but items dropping down into apprentice is making the review queue much bigger, in the next 24 hours I have 230 review items
I’ve realized that while the 85-95 window seems narrow, a review session where you miss EVERY single item will have an accuracy of 67%, so the difference between a 85% session and a 95% session is MASSIVE.
I was stuck like this on level 3 (I know… not very impressive) forever because I took a long break to focus on audio lessons, and my accuracy after coming back was terrible.
The thing that got me out of it was doing “Recent Lessons” again every day, and always reviewing recent mistakes.
Recent lessons every day gave me a chance to make mistakes when they don’t count.
It took me so long to get out of level 3 with the bad accuracy, but level 4 just flew by before I knew it.
I think a good rule of thumb is to have ~100 apprentice items at any given time. If you are failing items this amount won’t go down and it will give you an indicator to maybe slow down lessons until you can polish your current apprentice items a bit more. Not sure what your situation looks like, but that’s my general advice.
That’s always a good option if the reviews are a bit overwhelming, I used to do that. I kept apprentice items at a max of 100. But often I felt it slowed me down a lot and I didn’t like it. Nothing wrong with having 200+ reviews everyday honestly. You can do 200+ reviews in just 1 hour. You speed through the levels really fast that way and it’s kinda fun. Recently I’ve been doing 20 lessons a day and just ignoring how many apprentice items I have. Earlier this week I had 170 but now I have 110. Kinda just goes up and down.
In my experience, having more reviews doesn’t necessarily mean you’re more likely to forget earlier items or have a worse percentage, I think they are mostly unrelated things. The big difference is really just the time, if you have more apprentice items you’ll have more reviews. If you don’t want 200+ reviews then limiting apprentice items is a good idea, but I wouldn’t expect accuracy to necessarily increase. If you want to focus on increasing accuracy, recent mistakes is a solid idea. I don’t do that enough. Also just spending a lot of time on lessons is really helpful. I speed through reviews but spend around a minute per item on lessons.
I find it useful to have two accuracy percentage widgets on my dashboard - one is set to “Today” and the other “Past 7 Days”. If I see the percentage in the daily widget drop below 85% I don’t sweat it too much. Usually a momentary dip, but good to keep an eye on. But if the 7 day average starts to sink too much I will slow down new lessons.
Within the last few levels, my accuracy has tanked relative to before, and my apprentice numbers skyrocketed. I think for me, the accumulation of leeches plus the general difficulty of the vocab has hit a tipping point. I think I’ll drown if I even miss one day of reviews
Honestly just trying to keep my head down and push through the remaining stretch. Let’s all do our best!
meow just takes 30 mins to clear a 15 review session…I have very low slips since I started this and my real mistakes have been making it clear to me where I stand…instead of that dastardly finger slipping and typing the wrong kana !
I got stuck at level 15 for 170 days, both because I was moving too fast, and because I didn’t do a single review for 3 weeks while on a long vacation. Eventually I ended up with 2000 review items that took me a long time to recover from.
Now I target 20 days per level. For kanjis I do 10 new items per day. For vocab I bump that to 20. And I don’t worry about accuracy. Every wrong answer is a step toward the right answer. I also have already forgot burned items when I see them in the wild. Whatever. I don’t sweat that either. Eventually I’ll start reading more. Currently on my first manga (ever, not just in Japanese) and going painfully slow. But I expect regular reading is where the real brain burning will happen, no matter what the SRS claims. Nobody can truly memorize a complicated symbol after seeing it only a handful of times. SRS burning is just the first step.
And if you ever feel like you’re drowning… STOP DOING LESSONS. Get your review pile to zero and relax for 12 hours. A review pile that grows too big works against the SRS logic, by causing intervals to stretch. It’s similar to hitting the gym so hard that you hurt yourself. It will move you backwards rather than forwards.
