My method is to fail quickly and fail early. I’m fine with taking a bit longer to come up with the meaning/reading for Guru and beyond, but while an item is in Apprentice, if I don’t get it in 5 seconds, I’ll fail it and spend 10-15 seconds reinforcing the meaning/reading/mnemonic.
I find that this helps keep my accuracy up for when it comes around again during the longer intervals.
I feel you. The same thing happened to me in the early 20’s. I posted about it here:
The best thing to do is stop all lessons until you get the following:
- Apprentice around 100
- Guru around 500
Once you get to less than 100 or 50 items per day, then you can think about starting lessons again.