Overwhelming amount of SRS reviews

5 comments

1. I find jpdb overwhelming tbh so I don’t use it.

   I use anki and do 10 cards per day, after 6 months that’s like 50-70 cards per day

2. 1) Don’t stop. Make sure you can consistently do your reviews and get to zero at least once a week. SRS is about consistency.

   2) If it’s old stuff you already know then either choose “easy” and then again “easy” so that the next time you see it is in the far future or simply suspend the card altogether. Or at least that’s on Anki, not sure JPDB has something similar.

   P.S. If you find yourself stopping often, either your mind is elsewhere or you are using the wrong deck. (For the former, unless this is for work, Japanese can wait until you solve more important life problems.)

3. If you come across a card that you know for sure then add it to the list of “I’ll never forget this”. If you can only study intermittently then you can also increase your intervals between repeats in settings to maximum.

   Also be careful about pushing a card into “ease hell” where you’ve clicked hard on it so many times that it will continue giving it to you even once you’ve learned it.

4. That’s how SRS works. If you pass the card, then they won’t show up for a while. The more you pass it the longer the interval becomes. So for a new word or kanji, you can expect to see it pretty regularly for the first couple of days after learning it. For example, I’m looking in my own stats at a card I’ve never failed and only marked as ‘Okay’. I saw it three times the first day. Then once the next day. Then once three days after that. Then 9 days, 20 days, 43 days, and then the next gap will be almost 120 days. So after you’ve reviewed a word successfully throughout the first week you shouldn’t see it that often. If you’ve known 者 “for a long time” then mark it Easy and you won’t see it again for a while.

   Just get through the reviews and stay on top of them, and you’ll find yourself with a good mix of old and new cards. If your review queue is too big then it just means you’re adding too many new cards. Stop doing new cards until you get to zero, and then find a pace that’s sustainable for you. You can expect reviews to level out at around 10-15x the number of new cards you do. At least for me I do 20 new cards a day and in the last week I’ve done between 220 and 300 reviews a day. So if you can only do 50 reviews a day, then you’d want to limit to around 5 new cards per day.

5. Little and often. I’ve been doing SRS on wanikani for a while, level 42, if I skip a day I can have up to 300 waiting for me. 500 within 2 days. The key is to introduce new items slowly and nail them first time round, saves you a LOT of “relearning” later on. The spacing system of your app will push those ones out over time when you get them right enough times so they only appear after a week, a month, 3 months etc. so it doesn’t pile up too crazily.

   It is just difficult if you’re a newbie going from nothing to every lesson you can, especially if you are employed or have fulltime study, so let yourself get used to it before diving in uber deep

   I pretty much have made it a habit now to do all my srs every 3 – 4 hours every day. The morning is the longest slog, but I can do it at my desk at work, or in the morning over my first coffee and an episode of its always sunny to start my weekend. It is a commitment, but it’s much easier when you form a healthy habit.

   You will have periods where you get set back a lot (say a few days when you’re ill or on holiday and didn’t pause the app), and those can be a bitch to get back from, but it’s doable if you break the work down into manageable chunks through the day.

   Worst backlog I had was 600 reviews after a week of holiday, and it took me a month to feel motivated enough to get them back down