For career related reasons I will have to cut down my Chinese studies significantly - probably for a time frame of about 2 years. I already limited my community time, but now I need to go to the real meat.

What I absolutely want to avoid is losing it all during that time. So my primary goal for the next to years is: Keeping and consolodating my level.

What I think might work:
- listening to podcasts in idle situations (housework, commuting, etc.)

- casually reading some Chinese material

- keeping a daily "hibernating slot" (max. 45 minutes) in which I do some writing, work through the lessons here, or do some HSK material (not all each day and not in a high dose).

The fun times with 90-120 minutes each day plus some really heavy learning on the weekends are definitaly over.

Sigh. Hope it works.

By "Lesson" I mean a cpod lesson that has 10 or so new words in it that must be learned that you didn't already know/hear.

By "fast", I mean how long it took you from the time you started learning the lesson until you finished learning it and moved to the next lesson.  Start and finish have whatever meaning you want.

Notwithstanding the usual disclaimers about learning styles, and everyone learning differently, do what's best for you, there's no one right answer, and to each his own, etc..., i'm curious if people felt that they picked up mandarin effectively by listening to lots of lessons over a week versus studying them in detail and taking more time.

I'm starting to feel that it might make sense to blow though lots of lessons because:

1) Keeps me learning new "words" at a constant rate

2) the top level metric is better. in other words, i'm "learning" 50 words/week, albeit not retaining new words as well as i'd like, versus learning 10 words per week well.

I do remember Pimsleurs saying that a retention rate of around 80% was good enough to go to the next series of lessons.  If cpod were a college or high school class, 70 would be considered passing, and well enough to go to the next level (at least in high school). Cpod offers no guidance in this area, so i'm curious as to what others would say about this, or what worked for them.