Previously, I was studying very consistently, but I stopped for a few months. Now, I'm quite behind. Currently, I have more than 1,200 flash cards for review. I've been slowly going through 100-200 each day, but it's not going down very quickly.

Would you suggest I continue reviewing the flash cards until I have reviewed all of them? Or, should I continue watching videos while also doing the review? Thanks for anyone's advice!

This kind of thing happened to me over and over with Chinese (even here) and other languages. Having a huge pile of flashcards to review is discouraging and trying to review them all before progressing made me stop too many times, so now when I let them accumulate I try to do as you're doing, just a few everyday until it's done.

Flashcards are useful but after many years using them I've come to the conclusion that they're one of the most boring parts of language learning (textbooks tend to be rather dull too). Your language learning being boring tends to make you not want to do it. So when I have a huge pile of late flashcards I learned to just accept that I will forget stuff, and that's ok. Eventually I'll see or hear the same words many times and will get them.

But as I said I still find the cards useful and do some of them (almost) everyday, but I don't overdo it and when I'm fed up with flashcards I go some periods without reviewing.

You're totally right, Andrei! It's extremely discouraging. I guess I'm simply worried about continuing to learn more words when I haven't sufficiently studied what I already learned. But I guess that despite the wonderful structure Domino gives us, we still need to find what suits our lives.

I live in China with my wife (Chinese) and her parents, so I interact daily in Chinese. However, it seems many of the words and characters I don't remember aren't exactly the most common. For example, Domino Chinese does a great job at showing you lots of words you can create with just two or three characters. However, some of those words may not be very useful for daily life. They're important to bolster vocabulary, but not exactly necessary simply communicating. When I bump into a group of those words in the flash cards, I just don't know what to do. I wish we could "pause" of hide words rather than simply saying we remember or don't remember. This way, we can focus on the words we personally need to learn without getting caught up in ones that don't affect us. Then, we can add them back in over time.

All in all, I appreciate your perspective. Sometimes, I want to do things perfectly, but doing so might actually hurt my progress. If I stop studying because of flash cards, I won't progress at all. If I inconsistently use flash cards but I watch videos and chat in Chinese, I'll still progress but at a slower pace. Slower is better than nothing!

Thanks!

This does seem like an issue that's affecting a lot of our users. I think a "Pause Flashcard" button whilst reviewing your flashcard would help - I will add it to the todo list.

As an aside, for words that you haven't covered in the course but would like to study, you can search for this word in the dictionary and click the "Add to flashcards".

@Ifor, I submitted a feature request for that via the form I guess it didn't reach you.

I meant for pausing/freezing the deck.

Agreed @Ifor that this would be a great feature to add. Studied over 1k flashcards in the last few days and still not able to catch up which is slightly frustrating.

Hi Ifor, just checking if this is on the roadmap to be fixed? Noting it's been a while since it had been raised and the issue persists.

Most of the time what I'll do is I'll set a number of flashcards to finish or a time limit. So if I get swamped I'll set a goal to finish say.... 50 in a sitting, or about 10 minutes of my homework time, etc. whatever seems a fair number to finish for the day. From there will just continue to plug away at it!