掲示板 Forums - How do I stop it throwing loads of words at me? But just repeat a set?

Okay, so all I want it to do is repeat say a few words like say a max of five words until I've actually learned them, rather than it constantly throwing new words or just endlessly hundreds at me because I am not learning any at all.

The way I learned Hiragana and Katakana was to repeat the same five group of characters until I knew them via sites like jlptcards, then repeated the same method with a different set until I started putting them all together to repeat at random until I was getting them consistently right.

For example, the below I just had to set to 1 new word a day and 20 to review a day. But this isn't what I want, because I am not learning them I am just using a process of elimination and guesses rather than actually knowing them. It's incredibly frustrating.

It sounds like you're having a few different issues that need different solutions, so I'll make a few different suggestions.

First things first, Renshuu's schedules are a Spaced-Repetition System (SRS), meaning that questions are served to you (ideally) around the time that you would naturally forget, at progressively longer and longer intervals, in order to force terms into your long-term memory. Whenever you answer a question, the system will "schedule" when you need to review that question again based on whether you got it right or wrong and how you answered it in the past; if you're struggling with a word, you'll end up seeing it several times a week, while the words you have confidence in will naturally be served to you less and less often over time. SRS is a long-term, time-based system that depends on consistency and patience to work.

Cramming terms over and over in a short period of time traps them in your short-term memory, which is antithetical to the purpose of SRS and makes it less effective, so cramming in Renshuu will not contribute to your mastery levels or reduce the amount of terms that are scheduled to review. If you want cram instead of studying only what's been scheduled to review by the SRS, click the … button next the schedule name and open the schedule options, then choose "Focussed Review". "Focussed Review" will give you various options of what material from the schedule to study and how much. You can also cram by going to "Community Lists" in the Resources menu, finding the list of terms you want to cram, and using the "Study" button on that list.

It sounds like you've already found the settings to customize how many new terms you're served and your review goals, but I would recommend spending more time experimenting with those and tailoring those settings to what helps you learn best. If getting too many new words is frustrating you, you can simply set it to 0 and focus on reviewing for a while, or you can check the option to only introduce new terms after reviews are finished, so you can focus on new material by itself without review questions getting in the way, and aren't adding as much to your pile to review in the future. Any changes you make to the pace will take a few weeks of consistent review to see the effect of in the SRS, so it's best to start with very low numbers and then slowly increase them if you feel you can take on more, rather than starting with higher numbers and having to dial them down if you get overwhelmed with an untenable amount of reviews.

Since you mentioned process of elimination, I'm assuming that you're using multiple-choice answers and having them shown to you immediately. To prevent yourself from immediately solving multiple-choice questions via elimination, you can have the answers hidden by default to give you time to come up with the answer yourself -- go to the "Quizzing" section of your account settings, and toggle "Hide multiple-choice answers". Or you can go even further by choosing to type in your answers instead -- which you can toggle by going into your schedule's settings and checking the option to "Type/write the answer when possible". And if typing instead of picking form multiple choice helps you, there is another option in the "Quizzing" section of your account settings called "Write to reinforce", which will give you extra reinforcement by making you type out any answers you get wrong.