Lessons are supposed to be harder than reviews (or at least they should be unless you already knew the items for some reason). But “torture” sounds pretty extreme.
At the very least you might consider reducing the “lesson batch sizing” in your app preferences to 3 instead of 5. I don’t think your pace is abnormally slow, but neither do I think decreasing the amount of “torture” will slow your pace.
You’re absolutely, definitively not! Very few people make it as far as you have already.
Well, for what it’s worth, I think some part of you wants to be convinced to continue or you wouldn’t have posted this. The advice to turn on vacation mode and take a break for a while seems wise. At the very least it will give you time to decide if you want to quit or to continue.
Shameless plug:
If you do decide you want to continue, I’d be very curious to know more about your specific situation. We’re at almost exactly the same level, so it would be informative to compare our distributions of upcoming assignments across SRS stages, how many review sessions we do each day, how fast we’re answering questions, and our recent review history (how many reviews per day, and our accuracy rates).
I wrote a userscript (the GanbarOmeter) expressly to help myself and others manage their workload. It displays exactly the information I listed above.
In my specific situation, one thing that proved to be a TREMENDOUS improvement was performing extra, repeated, “out of band,” self-study reviews of items in stages 1 and 2 before doing my “real” reviews each day.
Items in stages 1 and 2 are mostly from recently completed lessons. I’d often forget these from the day before because I’d only seen them once (missing the 4-hour and 8-hour reviews). Everyone benefits from FREQUENT, REPEATED reviews of items in stages 1-2. Unless you’re doing reviews at least three times a day, you won’t get them. If, like me, you only do reviews once per day, I HIGHLY recommend doing out-of-band reviews for early stage items before starting your “real” reviews (the GanbarOmeter script will launch the self-study quiz with just those items for you).
頑張って！
My latest GanbarOmeter data for comparison (I’m on level 42):
