掲示板 Forums - Reviews quickly become overwhelming!

On any schedule: "Settings" → "More settings" → adjust your "Daily study goal".

Although I'd recommend trying to balance your daily new words so that you can clear all of your reviews. Potentially having hundreds of due reviews stuck behind a low "Daily study goal" seems like it would mess up your SRS (Spaced repetition). In the sense that it won't be nearly as effective as if you were clearing everything. That's just me though :)

Edit: You can tick "Don't learn new terms until daily review is finished" (it's next to the other setting) and only learn new words when you feel like your review pile is manageable. It also gives you better control over the number of new terms you learn.

Having a consistent daily (new words) target is nice, but you can easily stack up way too many reviews if you're not careful.

Either way, the number of terms for review will go down as you keep increasing their mastery level. They come up way less often at higher levels. It's only an issue if your new terms are 'outpacing' that process.

Good luck!

Edit: A few more things that you might find useful:

1) Having more "vectors" selected generally means more reviews.

2) You can click into any schedule to see your upcoming reviews:

( it's not always super accurate, but it does help with planning )

I forgot how exactly to do it, but when looking through renshuu, I found a button called holiday, and it lets you skip a period of time without extra reviews. Also, I would lower your test score

Definitely check out the thread mentioned above, but I think you're going to have to contend with your irregular schedule one way or another. Every SRS expects you to come back and do your reviews daily. If you can't do that, you're going to have problems.

There's 2 things you need to do:

1. Find a time you can consistently use Renshuu. That might be in the morning, at lunch, before bed, whatever. It just needs to be consistent.

2. Figure out what you're spending the most time on and find a way to lower that time. Michael's tips will help with this.

I'll repeat some important tips here and add some of my own.

If you have writing enabled, that will slow you down a lot. You can try using the setting to enable writing only after a certain mastery level, like 3 or so.

New terms are the biggest source of reviews. If you learn more than 5 a day, you should expect a lot of reviews. The lower this number, the slower you'll progress, but you'll have fewer reviews too.

Note that each mastery schedule has multiple study vectors. If you learn a new term, you're effectively learning it once for each vector. So if you have 5 enabled, you'll have 5 times more reviews than if you have 1 enabled. So only enable the vectors you think will benefit you the most.

You might be too early on for this tip, but it's useful. Make a special mastery schedule for review and move older terms into it. That way you can have special settings only for words you're fairly confident in, but still want to review. On my review schedule, I left my normal study vectors on, but switched from "slow and thorough" to "quick and simple". That way I'm still studying everything, but don't have to worry about reviews piling up as much. My active schedules are still "slow and thorough".

Enable a couple holiday days. No new reviews will be scheduled on those days. So if you miss a day, you can use your holiday days to make up for it.

EDIT:

Also use a kanji helper schedule! Renshuu's default kanji schedules teach in JLPT order, which is fine, but it also leads to excess reviews in my experience.

If you have Japanese -> English enabled, you'll start learning a word as hiragana -> English. When you learn a kanji in the word, your progress for that word effectively resets and now you're quizzed on kanji -> English.

If you use a kanji helper schedule, you can set it to teach you ALL kanji in the words you're learning. Ideally, you'll learn the kanji you need before the word that uses it. This should skip the hiragana phase, leading to fewer reviews overall. This would work best with Renshuu's default vocab schedules.

You can also just disable kana -> meaning, but I'm not sure what the consequences of that are. I'd leave it on and rely on a kanji helper schedule.