{{first_name | みんな}}さん、こんにちは ☕

You opened your SRS this morning and closed it three seconds later.

Not because you didn't have time. Because the number was 540. Or 300. Or whatever your personal "nope" threshold is.

You closed the app, felt guilty, and told yourself you'd do it later. You didn't.

That number isn't going down on its own. But deleting your deck isn't the answer either.

If this SRS rescue plan clicks for you, it'll click for someone you know. Share your link: {{rp_refer_url}}

Here's the part you almost never see in "my settings" screenshots.

You add 20 new cards a day to your SRS system (Anki, Bunpro, JPDB, Kitsun — whatever you use) and feel great about it.

Week one: smooth. 30 reviews, 40, maybe 60. You're learning words, nailing recall, riding the dopamine.

Week four: 150 reviews. Hmm. But you push through.

Week six: 200 reviews. Every. Single. Day. The commonly cited rule of thumb: new cards per day times roughly 10 equals your daily review load at steady state. Not 3. Not 5. Ten. Twenty new cards a day means ~200 reviews, every day, indefinitely.

Nobody warned you. The app certainly didn't.

Then you get sick for a week. You come back to 800+ reviews. This isn't a discipline failure — it's a math problem that the default settings created and the interface never flagged.

We see this constantly in community threads.

One Bunpro user with a lifetime account abandoned the platform for months because "it overloads the user with too many reviews which leads to burnout."

A YouTuber deleted a 10,605-card deck on camera after letting 6,071 words pile up.

A commenter on Tae Kim's blog did over half a million repetitions across 40,000 cards over six years before hitting the wall.

This isn't a fringe experience. It might be the most common one.

But here's the part nobody talks about: the fix isn't one-size-fits-all. It depends on where things went wrong — and there's a right order to work through it.

Check your review count right now. If daily reviews have exceeded double your comfortable capacity for two or more weeks straight, the deck isn't working as-is. But "not working" is not the same as "delete everything."

The first move is a settings change. The order here matters — fix the system before you fix the backlog, or you'll be back here in a month.

If your SRS supports FSRS (Anki has since v23.10, late 2023), switch from SM-2 to FSRS. One toggle.

Here's what that toggle does: FSRS adapts to how you actually forget. Instead of applying the same formula to every learner, it builds a model from your review history. The FSRS project's own benchmarks show it reduces daily reviews by roughly 20-30% compared to SM-2 at the same retention level. It also eliminates the ease factor mechanic that causes ease hell — that doom loop where failed cards get trapped in increasingly short intervals forever. That alone can unclog a stuck deck.

Next: find your leeches. Cards you've failed 5+ times are actively making things worse — they cycle back every day or two, eating review time without sticking. Suspend them. Don't delete — suspend. You'll meet those words in reading instead. We'll do a deeper leech playbook in a future edition.

Then — and only after reducing future inflow — sort your overdue cards by how overdue they are and tackle the worst ones first, in batches of 30-50. Never reset your scheduling history. That data is valuable.

Each cause has a different fix. Figure out which one is yours.

Too many new cards. This is the big one. And the fix isn't just "lower the number" — it's changing how you think about new cards entirely.

Here's what we mean: your new card count shouldn't be a fixed daily target. It should flex with your life. Monday is light and you're feeling sharp? Add 10-15. Wednesday you have overtime and a headache? Zero. Weekend with nothing planned? Maybe 10 again. Busy week overall? Zero all week — clear the backlog, read a manga chapter instead, and come back to new cards when you have bandwidth.

If your count is out of control right now, here's the concrete move: set new cards to 0 for the next 7 days. Let reviews stabilize. Then reintroduce at 5 per day and see how it feels. Adjust from there — never go above 15 as a ceiling.

The "I'll add 20 because I'm motivated today" trap is how every SRS spiral starts. We've seen learners with 700 new cards queued — that's 70 days of new material before touching old reviews. Motivation fluctuates. Your settings shouldn't.

And here's the part that gets lost in the SRS conversation: adding cards is not studying Japanese. It's one slice of studying Japanese. If your entire study session is SRS reviews, something's off balance. Reading, working through grammar, watching a show with intention, listening to a podcast — that's where the language actually lives. SRS reinforces what you encounter elsewhere. When new cards replace all of that, the tool has outgrown its role.

Missed days. This is a settings problem, not a willpower problem. If your SRS supports it, enable review caps or "Easy Days" scheduling (available in Anki with FSRS) so missed days spread across future sessions instead of slamming you on Monday morning.

Wrong retention target. FSRS defaults to 90% desired retention. That's reasonable. But if you're drowning in reviews, try 85%. Sounds counterintuitive — accept more forgetting? — but dropping from 90% to 85% can meaningfully reduce review volume. Natural reading and listening reinforce high-frequency words anyway. You're not losing them permanently.

Here's something we wish someone had told us earlier: hating your SRS is not the same as hating Japanese. Tool fatigue and language fatigue feel identical, but they're not. One means you need a different tool (or a different relationship with the current one). The other means you need a break. Know which one you're feeling before you make a decision.

SRS is a support tool. It reinforces vocabulary and kanji you're encountering through reading, grammar study, conversation, shows, and all the other ways you actually engage with Japanese. It was never designed to be the main event — and when it starts feeling like it is, that's the signal to rebalance, not to grind harder.

That said, there's a version of this where SRS really has finished its job. Ask yourself:

If all four are true, congratulations — the scaffolding did its work. Stop adding new cards. Let reviews naturally decline. Don't delete the deck — just stop feeding it. That's not quitting. That's graduating.

And if none of those are true but you still dread opening the app? That's usually a sign that SRS has taken over too much of your study time. Scale it back. Cap your daily reviews at a number that leaves room for actual Japanese — reading a page of a novel, watching a scene without subtitles, working through a grammar point. The sunk cost fallacy will tell you to keep the 3,000-card deck because you spent six months building it. Ignore that voice. Rebuild smaller if you need to. Or switch tools entirely. The knowledge stays — only the container changes.

Reply with your current review count. No judgment. We'll send back a one-line triage recommendation. Seriously — hit reply.

Long before any app existed, Japanese students learned a rhythm that every SRS developer eventually reinvented.

予習よしゅう — preparation before class. 復習ふくしゅう — review after class. This pair gets drilled into students from elementary school onward. Teachers write 予習よしゅう・復習ふくしゅう on the board. Parents ask about it at dinner. It's not a study hack — it's the default assumption of how learning works.

The idea is simple: you preview material so the lesson makes sense, then you revisit it so the lesson sticks. The gap between the two is where understanding deepens. Sound familiar?

Spaced repetition is 復習ふくしゅう with a scheduling algorithm. That's all it ever was. And just like Japanese students don't spend their entire evening on 復習ふくしゅう alone — they also read, write, practice problems, and live their lives — your SRS shouldn't consume your entire study session either.

The next time your review count feels like a personal failing, remember: the concept of structured review is so fundamental to learning that the Japanese education system built it into the daily vocabulary of every child in the country. You're not behind. You just need to get the balance right.

Last week's answers (Issue #007 — "The Seems Like Spectrum"):

The exercise: sort four scenarios by information source.

The pattern: the further right on the spectrum, the less direct your connection to the information.

If you opened your SRS today — even for 20 reviews out of 500 — you broke the avoidance cycle. The hardest review isn't the 500th. It's the first one after you've been hiding.