Is it possible to pause learning and focus on reviews?

Bunpro
#1

Hey, I’m new here. I just signed up a week ago. Sorry for the seemingly silly question, but is it possible to pause new learning so I can focus on reviews? I’ve made the common mistake of learning too much too fast and my recall is really bad now and I’m failing most of my reviews, so I want to pause new grammar and vocab, focus on getting my reviews down to a position where I feel comfortable with what I’ve learned so far, and then start up again with a much lower number to learn going forwards.

Or to do this do I simply just ignore the ‘learn’ queue for now and focus on the reviews only, and then when I feel comfortable pick up the learn queue again?

Thanks.

2 Likes
#2

Yes, I think this is one of the more important ‘rules’ to follow using an SRS system like this, is to always make sure you are on top of your reviews, ignoring adding new items if the reviews have stacked high. Right now you are very early on so you are still figuring out how many items to add daily makes sense, and what you’ll find is it keeping up with reviews and how much they stack determines how often/how many daily items you add. Finding this pace is really important going forwards.

What you really want to avoid is hitting a point where so many reviews stack up that it makes you want to put it off/etc. For me since you can see how many future reviews are popping up, if I see tomorrow has a big stack of items I might not add any new items today just to make sure I don’t overwhelm future me. And also especially if I know I will be away for a few days and can’t even do reviews, I’ll not add new items right before leaving as it just leads to tons of beginner level items I’ll fail when I try to review the few days later rather than the next day.

4 Likes
#3

Yeah, like any SRS you, you should prioritize your reviews over new cards. If you feel like you took too many new cards, just don’t take anymore and focus on getting reviews to a manageable level.

The trick is to figure out how many new cards you can do per day while maintaining a manageable amount of reviews. Take less new cards when you start learning again and after a month or 2 re-assess. Can you take more? Should you take less? It’s a balancing act.

1 Like
#4

Nothing bad will happen if you feel the need to stop doing new lessons:

  • You can resume them whenever you feel like it, pickup where you left off or go back a bit
  • You will keep getting study streaks etc. if you “just” do your reviews

The only bad outcome that can stem from pausing the learning is:

  • You won’t reach your numeric goals: you may have underestimated the task, and having done less than X amount to focus on the quality of the learning is really not a bad thing
  • You might get bored reviewing the same thing over and over. But that’s okay and when you feel like this is the case you can jump back into learning in a click :slight_smile:

Also as mentioned before, it’s a spectrum and a balancing act. Hopefully rather than learning “too much” or “nothing at all”, you can find an amount that fits you in the long term. (I like having a relatively low amount as a daily goal and I’ll do more whenever I feel like it.)

#5

Well, this question asks “is it possible?”, so to me it sounds like asking how to, mechanically, pause learning.

You don’t need to pause anything. You should have two buttons: Learn; and Review.

Just only hit the review button for a few days (or maybe even weeks?) while you work down your review queue. It won’t mess with your streak or anything. As long as you answer, I think it’s 10 questions, in a day, it’ll count as having studied that day.

But to echo the others, yeah, pausing is totally appropriate when you find yourself getting too bogged down. This happened to me a lot during some of the very similar, yet subtly different grammar points in much of N4.