The Real Problem of Knocking Out 500+ Reviews
A buildup of reviews is inevitable. You are going to get caught up in something non-Japanese and your numbers will grow. You forgot to turn on vacation mode. Now you have a vicious number staring you down.
You decide to make today a full burst review day. You’ll spend hours on end to reach that beautiful “0 reviews due” you crave.
Initial success and glory
It’s not easy to spending several hours to a full day doing nothing but chipping away at a large review number. But it can be done. It has been done by countless people before you. The monstrous number actually has an unintended benefit. It is motivating. You probably think the opposite – that there is a correlation between the size of your reviews and the size of your motivation. One goes up, the other goes down. I think this is only partially true.
Having a big number of reviews drains your motivation. 250-400 is usually a motivation killer. It is most likely caused by a recent lapse, and you can feel it painfully growing with time.
Having a massive number of reviews does something slightly different. 1000 reviews is a dungeon boss threat. Overcoming this is no easy feat. It’s a challenge worthy of a Japanese slayer. From this comes unexpected motivation.
What’s more rewarding?
- Fighting and winning against a small barrage of strong monsters daily.
- Fighting and winning against a seemingly insurmountable foe.
This is why 300 reviews often turns to 1000 reviews and then eventually back to 0. The rewards system is set up this way. Except there is one remaining problem.
The next days are brutal
When you defeat a major boss in a game, you don’t then immediately return to a super hard dungeon of new and frustrating battles. You get a break, return to town, get some interesting story, then face weaker enemies, working your way up to the next boss.
Flash card reviews do not work this way. Slashing 1000 to 0 is only the beginning. The next several days include all the reviews you marked wrong, as well as all the others that would typically be due.
Scenario 1
Day 1: 1000
Day 2: 700
Day 3: 500
Day 4: 300
Day 5: 200
Every day feels like a continuous boss battle, that slowly gets better over time.
Scenario 2
Day 1: 500
Day 2: 300
Day 3: 200
…
Day 7: 500
Your review count can actually go back up after going back down, even if you are zeroing out your reviews daily. This happens either from cards marked incorrect, or from recently learned cards marked correct that all come in for review again at the same interval.
Prepare for the long battle
The 1-day victory can feel good, and you should feel proud. But any time you face an unstoppable number, you need to mentally prepare for a drawn out battle. By doing so you prevent victory from turning into defeat. By doing so you grow stronger. By doing so you promise yourself you won’t let it happen again. Overcome enough of these battles and you’ll be surprised where you end up.
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
Ive let my kanji deck slip pretty bad, and now I have almost every card that ive learned due for review, which is around 700. The problem is I havent got a single card right in a while in there due to the amount of time passed and there are so many cards backed up that I dont get to retry failed cards for a long time. Ive been thinking about trying to manually reset that deck through the export file and then attacking it again from the start, that way each failed card doesnt have 700 items in front of it.
If almost every card of the deck is due, and you get almost all of them wrong, then a reset would definitely benefit you. And it’s not like you “lost” what you learned. When you come across kanji that you do indeed remember, you’ll go through them much quicker then your first time around.
You know that from the settings you can just reset Kanji Kingdom, right? You don’t need to manually do anything.
Oh wow I dont know why I didnt try that (-.-;) just reset. And I dont feel like I lost anything! Excited to start from the beginning again.
Gonna pile onto Adam’s suggestion! I reset my JALUP decks. Twice. Worked really well – and it just reinforces what you know. If you come across a card you already know, just press “easy”. Don’t go through it too fast. Good luck!
Following on from that idea… I’ve been considering something for the Beginner pack, and wanted to get suggestions from those who have been using JALUP for a while (and Adam ; )
I feel quite confident in a large amount of the beginner pack so considering resetting it, and then learning/reviewing cards audio only (in the hope of improving my listening).
Has anyone tried, this, is it a worthwhile use of my time?
Or do you think other activities are superior for improving listening comprehension (e.g. immersion, active listening (+ passive), increased exposure (higher level Jalup decks).
I use the listen feature to listen to a range of cards when I go for walks (sometime shadowing, sometimes not), but this process doesn’t have the “review/SRS” advantage.
Thanks all!
While I do think it’s an interesting idea, I’m leaning towards thinking you’d be better off keeping that progress and then doing other listening activities.
However, I haven’t personally heard of anyone trying this. I do know some people have requested a listening-only type of flash card on the app though. So it might work and you can prove me wrong :)
Thanks for the reply Adam!
I think I will try it, I have 200 more cards to go in Intermediate so I am going to finish those off and get to a comfortable review level and then give it a go!
I’m not sure how well I can measure my progress, so it will be anecdotal I suspect but I’m happy to experiment!
Will update this post in a couple of months to let you know how it’s going.
Sounds good. Experimentation is important, so please do keep us updated.
Resetting a deck was one of the most requested early features of the app. So I think a lot of people at one time want to go for a reset.
Hi Adam,
So I’ve been thinking further on this and I have a new plan which won’t break my current JALUP SRS.
Using a second device I have installed JALUP and started beginner and intermediate.
My plan was to assess my listening on both. Unfortunately this did not help with beginner as I found all first 100 cards 100% comprehension, not that I am unhappy with that!
For context, I am a recent JALUP user, and I am at 800/1000 cards on intermediate. I estimate I started Intermediate less than 3 months ago.
My new plan is to do Intermediate, first 100 cards.
I am self assessing today, with a SINGLE listen of each card and rating myself as follows (it has been humbling ; ):
1 Cannot understand sentence at all
2 Can understand some words in sentence (but not sentence)
3 I could guess at meaning from words and grammar I recognise
4 I have a good comprehension but not 100% confident in meaning
5 Total comprehension of sentence
(Point 5 is “based on my understanding at my level from reviewing cards previously”)
I will then review the deck (without audio) and do a side-by-side assessment (based on one read (as much as that is possible))
After all that, I am going to start SRS based on single listens of the cards for reviews (see next point) and then plan to perform interim “tests” same as the original self assessment (question below).
To help me maintain single reviews on cards, I have come up with…
1. Use “cards remaining” on “Flip” button
1. Set reviews to daily
2. Enable audio on review
3. Do the days reviews once
4. Disable audio on review
5. Set “failed” cards to lowest possible interval.
If anyone has suggestions/tweaks happy to hear them.
One question I have, on the interim tests.
I was thinking of testing myself weekly, but now I’m considering monthly, do you think weekly would be too often?
I’ll keep you updated here.
All the best, and thanks for the encouragement.
Sounds like a good plan you have set up there.
As for testing period, see which motivates you more. If you find doing them weekly gets annoying and feels more like a drag on your studying, then push them to monthly.
I mean to post my update here, but accidentally posted it in the main thread.
It starts “Update after two weeks.”
I’m knocking down a wall of 560 reviews on wanikani right now. It’s a really big task, but I will finish this wall off. I’m sure of it.
Anki lets you put an upper limit on how many review you do each day. I’ve found that setting decks with high reviews to a max of 30 a day helps make it /look/ more manageable. Once I get through that 30, I “increase today’s review limit” by 30. Rinse and repeat until the reviews are all gone. I’ve found that it’s an effective method of tricking yourself into looking at the mountain and seeing just a molehill.
Update after two weeks.
In the end I changed my mind again. Since finding out I can install JALUP Maximum on a second device as part of owning it (Thanks Adam!) I have gone back to beginner.
Summary:
I ignored the first 100 or so cards which I found easy
I tested the next 50 (Batch A)
I tested the 50 after that (Batch B – Control set)
For two weeks I have been SRS’ing Batch A and today I tested my comprehension.
This table shows the CHANGE in rating (positive numbers good) (rating is 1-5)
Rating Count
-2 2
-1 2
0 19
1 18
2 8
3 1
As you can see, apart from a few outliers, I have improved on over half of the cards.
I put this down to:
1. Recent familiarity with the cards
2. A genuine increase in listening comprehension
Overall, I am happy with this first assessment.
I feel I am benefiting from the instant feedback following a listening review and I am coming to understand the “gaps” in my listening comprehension
– words/phrases that sound similar
– tendency to miss words if I hit a word I can’t instantly recognise early on in the sentence
– training my brain to digest “chunks”
My expectation is that this skill will improve over time, but I feel having a better understanding of it will accelerate my learning.
Finally, what about that control deck, well I tested that too and these are my results:
Rating Count
-2 2
-1 9
0 28
1 6
2 5
Nothing to write home about yet :)
Notes, I am self-assessing and restricting myself to one listen so distractions etc. can cause wild fluctuations. Still… I am interested to see if I see marked improvements on cards I am not reviewing as time goes on.
Finally, I am going to keep adding more cards to the SRS (after taking a baseline assessment) as and when it’s comfortable.
Will check back in a few weeks when I have more data points!
Another quick update,
Since my last post I added in another 50 beginner cards and I have just done a sample listening test and I believe the results are positive.
I have seen an increase in (self-rated) comprehension of over half of these additional 50 cards. Additionally it *feels* like I’m improving when I do listening reviews.
On balance, the amount of extra time required to do these reviews is fairly minimal, I believe the time is (currently) worthwhile.
The time sap is when I review all (currently 150 cards) to check my progress.
In summary, I think this is a good use of my time, as listening is something I really want to improve on in 2020!
* Update *
Formatting of tables did not go as expected so here’s a CSV
Batch A
Rating,Count
-2,2
-1,2
0,19
1,18
2,8
3,1
Batch B (Control)
Rating,Count
-2,2
-1,9
0,28
1,6
2,5
The most recent anki update broke something so now all 1423 cards are due (half Kanji, half vocab). Looking at Gareth, this is a good time to learn the Japanese keyword, not just an English one in my kanji deck.