Two quiet parts of Learning share a page: the weekly pace you choose, and the small number of messages we are willing to send about it.Both are built around the same finding, which is that pressure is easy to add and hard to make useful.
Light is 60 minutes a week, Steady is 120 and Immersive is 420. You are choosing how much time you have, which is a question you can answer before you start. How many graded attempts you should make is not.
These three totals are our starting values, not a research result. Nothing in the spacing or practice literature establishes a weekly minute dose for language learning, and we make no claim that 120 minutes teaches twice what 60 does.
Light is the one we suggest first, for a plain reason: it asks for the least time up front. You can move up after two weeks with evidence about your own schedule instead of a guess about it.
The cadence is a suggestion
Each preset shows a shape for the week: three sessions of about 20 minutes for Light, four of about 30 for Steady, seven of about 60 for Immersive. Spread-out practice beats one long sitting in the second-language research, so the shape is worth having.The weekly total is the goal. The days are a spacing suggestion.
Missing a suggested day costs you nothing here. There is no streak to break, no failure state and no extra reminder. In a habit-formation study, missing a single day did not materially affect how the habit formed, and rigid daily windows produced fewer sessions than flexible ones both during a programme and after it.
What the minutes measure
The figure on your Overview is an estimate of active learning time: time spent working on approved learning surfaces, not time with a tab open. Server-side caps stop multiple tabs and retries from adding up.Treat it as a rough weekly picture. It is not a stopwatch, and we would rather it under-count than flatter you.
Saving a goal is what starts the counting
No study minutes are collected until you explicitly save a pace. Clearing it stops new collection immediately. What was already recorded stays available to export or to delete, and deleting your profile data removes it.The week in which you switch it on is labelled partial. It contains only the minutes after you saved, nothing is back-filled, and a partial week gets no completion judgement and no late-week reminder.Changing your pace or your timezone starts a new partial interval in the same way. Your earlier minutes are kept exactly as recorded.
The two-week review
After two complete goal weeks the Overview may offer Review your pace. It shows both weeks and lets you keep, lower or raise the preset. That is the whole feature.
The system never changes your pace for you, and lowering it is a normal outcome rather than a setback. A target you meet is more useful than one you admire.
A reminder can replace the habit
In a randomised trial, study reminders raised the odds of studying on the day they arrived and lowered study on the days without one. The authors read that as overreliance and recommend fading reminders out. Ours fade as your own return pattern settles.
Content beats cadence
The clearest finding we could stand behind is that a message stating your actual position beats a generic one sent at the same rate. So the digest carries your real state: what is due, and where you stopped reading.
The evidence here is thinner than we would like. It rests on one small trial.
The channel was a product decision
Nothing we found compares email against push against in-app messaging for learning. We chose email for the digest on cost and control, and the evidence did not make that call for us.The one exception is the follow-up reminder: when you ask for it, a single in-app notification arrives at the due time under the notification preference you already set. It does not repeat and it does not open a new channel.
Getting the most out of it
Pick the pace that survives a bad week, then raise it at the two-week review if it was too easy.
Read the weekly minutes as a rough picture of the week, not as a measurement of your effort.
Missing a day costs you nothing. Missing a month costs you the schedule, not a streak.
Turn the digest off if it stops telling you something you did not know. It is meant to carry state, not to nag.
Clear the pace goal if you do not want study time recorded at all. That stops the collection, not just the display.
Under the hood
Activity collection begins at the moment a STUDY_MINUTES goal is saved and stops at the moment it is cleared. There is no retroactive minute.Minutes are attributed to weekly intervals in your own timezone. Changing pace or timezone closes the current interval and opens a partial one; earlier intervals are never rewritten.Raw activity rows stay on our own infrastructure, are included in an authorised export while retained, and are deleted by the per-language profile reset along with their daily and weekly aggregates.The digest is assembled from your due review cards, unfinished course sections and the chapter you stopped on. It sends at most once per week and skips entirely when there is nothing to say.Reminder frequency steps down automatically as your return visits become regular, and copy rotates with a cooldown so the same sentence does not arrive twice in a row.