I was rockin' it back in the summer and got up to about the 750 mark. Then work and other things got busy for me and I first tapered off, and finally just stopped studying altogether. So there's my Failed and Review piles, completely brimming full. Should I

a) just dive into the review like normal and go over the kanji randomly?

or

b) get a new login and just start from scratch. This way I will re-introduce all those groupings in a logical manner.

I'm thinking b) is the better option, maybe. a) will just discourage me, maybe. But I want to hear others' opinions, anyone who's been in a similar situation. Any advice?

I kind of did option b) a while back. Had been studying Kanji up until about 600~700 (without any knowledge of this site, SRS etc.) and then did nothing for at least half a year. When I found out about this site and AJATT I was finally motivated enough to give it another try so I started from scratch by using RevTK. In the beginning it was a piece of cake as I still somehow remembered most of the Kanjis I had learned, but as I rushed through the first 600 or so Kanji while still adding 15-30 new ones a day, reviews were piling up fast (sometimes 300 or more a day). So if like me you still know most of the Kanji you had learned, I would recommend you to just use your old deck, otherwise you might drown in reviews.
I managed to do it nevertheless, and so will you, regardless of which option you settle for.

well i was at 600, i had ~600 to review, and I just worked up from a). I'm back on track now hitting 950. With some of the early ones i completely forget, e.g i saw stomach pop up in a review the other day and im like 'wtf is a stomach' but once clicked show, i saw it and im like 'ohh THAT stomach", after i saw it i didn't even fail the card. The stories will get back to you.

If you think you remember a lot of the stuff, one of the below might be a good option:

If using Anki:

Get a fresh Heisig deck. Start from 1, and do speed reviews up to the area you last learned. Have three different passes: one hard pass that lasts about 1-3 days, one medium pass that lasts 1-1.5 weeks, and one very easy pass that lasts 3 weeks (for cards you -know- you know).

Speed review the kanji you learned. Take 5 seconds to think about it at most. If you know it, you know it. If you have to think about it, give it the 1-3 days and see if you can remember it again.

Find the ones you failed, and review and make stories for those.

RevTK:

Same thing, except remove all your cards and make sure you have only cards added up to the number you last learned. You can't lengthen the reviews very much though, so you will end up reviewing a lot again. Depending how well you know the stuff you did before you quit, this may be good or bad.


If you try one of these strategies and find that you are consistently failing cards over and over, just restart RtK.