Ideally, you want to review every day so as you have no expired kanji. Try not to skip days, they will catch up to you real quick.

Ryuujin-> Shouldn't hurt you at all.... I've had many a day where I sit down and say "My brain just can't handle any new stories right now."  As long as you stay on top of your reviews, you'll be fine. The new stuff can come when you're ready.



I guess the main point is to not let yourself get too down about having large piles of stuff hanging around. Just do what you can for the day and leave the rest for later...  The point is to make a regular habit out of reviewing and to move at your own pace, not to kill yourself over trying to do a huge chunk of stuff in one sitting.

Ahh, to both shneen and Jarvik7, thank you for the replies.

I guess I'll just have to work extra hard to get back into my kanji studies once some free time finally frees up (weird wording). Either way, I'll just try to go slow at like 5-10 a day or so.

P.S. - Jarvik - Ahh, thanks for telling me. I've been dying to know what it was. I'll have to write it out and show it to my Chinese teacher now, see if she knows it.

Not talking about reviews but remembering new stories... I started out (after the first 100~150 which I already sorta knew) doing 5 new kanji a day. It was horrible, I couldn't remember them and the next day I surely had forgotten 3/4 of the 5 new ones... Now I set a goal of at least 18 a day (so I can finish somewhere in July (I'm at 500-something now)) and... to my surprise, I only forget 1 or 2 out of 20~30 new kanji. It actually sticks better, and it takes me less time per kanji to make stories in the first place.

I do 'cheat' because I review them myself in the evening so I can get back to stories that didn't stick in the first place... But for some reason it seems to work better to do more new kanji a day.

On topic, I think skipping a day or two of adding new cards won't hurt, well maybe you have to get back into it when you do add new cards. But just _do_ those reviews, no excuses

(This is what is starting to scare me, because I've been adding 20~30 kanji each day, for the past 4~5 days... I have to review over 50 kanji a day now. It's not that much but... where will it end? If I keep up this pace, how much will the max count of reviews become? ... It should stabilize at some point... right? (If... I don't fail too many kanji.))

In my opinion, I just have to keep the expiring kanji number under control.  If that number get's too high, then I can't finish that days reviews in a day.  That did happen to me.  Then what happened is that it would be more than the required "forgetting interval" before I got to the review, so I was failing more (not so much because of a bad story). 

If you let the failed kanji pile up, then you *really* have a re-learning challenge that you'll have to face sometime.

So, I set the goal of *always* finishing the expired kanji.  Next, I set a goal of *all* the failed kanji, but if I cannot do all, then at least x.  That way, I was continuosly getting the missed ones back into the review rotations, or at least whittling down that stack and making progress towards an empty failed kanji stack.  Once I've got all the reviews done, and all the failed kanji worked out, then (if there's time/energy remaining) then I can look at totally new kanji. 

So, for me, the idea is only add new kanji such that you can complete the next day's reviews in a reasonable period of study. Each of us will have a different tolerance there, so it could be a different number.

I think of juggling.  I have to keep the number of items "in the air" to a manageable size.