Frequently asked questions

No. Click any course and start immediately — no email, password, or account needed. Lessons, exercises, and reviews all work right away, and your progress is saved temporarily.

Sign up (for free) whenever you like to lock in your progress, pick up where you left off on any device, and create your own courses. Your existing progress carries straight over to your new account — nothing is lost.

Yes — every course, lesson, and exercise is free for everyone, with no paywalls. An optional Pro membership unlocks a few extras and helps keep the platform free for all learners:

• Unlimited AI tutor questions (free users get 5 a day)
• Dark mode
• Progress statistics
• The ability to freeze reviews for specific courses
• Unlimited vacation days

You can subscribe monthly or yearly on the membership page, and manage or cancel anytime.

Elon.io schedules everything you learn for review using spaced repetition. Each time you answer an item correctly, the gap until its next review grows (roughly four times longer each time), so material you know well comes back less and less often. Answer one wrong and it returns much sooner, so you get the extra practice exactly where you need it.

Items appear in your review queue the moment they’re due. Nothing expires — if you take a break, your reviews simply wait for you, but don't let too many pile up, or you'll regret it!

You can choose how your due reviews reach you, and the choice is per course.

With separated reviews (the default), your reviews are kept in their own queue: a message appears at the top of the screen when it’s time to do them, and starting a new lesson won’t mix in reviews from earlier lessons. New material and revision stay separate.

With integrated reviews, your due reviews are folded into your lessons as you learn — each session blends fresh items with the ones you’re due to revisit, so there’s no separate queue to clear. There’s a cap on how many reviews appear before each new item, so they’re metered out a few at a time rather than piling up — and in most cases you end up doing fewer reviews overall.

Because it’s a per-course setting, you can separate one language and integrate another. Switch anytime from the course settings menu.

Every item you learn carries a memory level of its own — 1 to 9 in practice — and your skill points are simply the sum of those levels across the course. They aren’t XP: nothing is awarded for time spent or exercises done, and when you forget something its level drops and your total drops with it. Skill points measure what you currently know, not how much you’ve practised.

An item’s level is the interval the schedule currently trusts you over, in powers of four: level 3 is about a day, 4 is four days, 5 a fortnight, 6 two months, 7 eight months, 8 roughly three years. Levels 1 and 2 are the sub-day range, where an item lives on the day you first meet it. Answer something correctly at first sight and it enters at level 3, worth three points at once; every review you pass moves it up one level (one point), and every miss moves it down one.

The “Memory strength” bars on your statistics page are those same levels, grouped: New (1–2), Learning (3–4), Solid (5–6), Mastered (7 and up).

The Level in the top tile is a different number: a single figure derived from your skill-point total for that course. Each level costs 25 points more than the one before — level 2 opens at 25 points, level 5 at 250, level 11 at 1,375, level 20 at 4,750. The early ones arrive every day or two; later ones take weeks of real work.

There’s no quota, but here are the real numbers. Across the platform the median active day is 80 exercises. Among learners who show up on 25 days or more out of 30, the average is about 134 exercises and some 20 new items a day — roughly 500 skill points a week — at around 72% correct, which is where a well-tuned spaced-repetition schedule should sit.

Around 100 exercises a day is the pace the whole system is designed for, and it is what the super streak asks of you. The everyday streak deliberately sits well below that, at 25, so that an ordinary day still counts for something. Regularity matters more than session length: reviews come due on their own clock, so a skipped day isn’t erased, it simply lands on top of the next day’s. The 14-day forecast on your course statistics page shows what’s heading your way.

Your streak counts the consecutive days on which you complete at least 25 exercises. Hit 25 in a day and your streak is safe; it ticks up for every day you keep it going. Exercises from all of your courses count toward the same daily 25.

Reach 100 exercises in a day and you also earn a super streak, which counts the consecutive days you hit that higher mark. The two run side by side on the same history: a 30-exercise day keeps your streak going and ends your super streak, without touching the streak itself.

Days are calendar days in your own time zone — your browser tells us which one — not 0000 GMT, and not a rolling 24-hour span. Each exercise is filed under the local date on which you answered it.

A new day doesn’t reset your streak at midnight — the day in progress never counts against you, so you have until the end of the day to do your 25 and keep it going. But let a whole day pass under 25 and the streak is gone; the same applies to the super streak at 100. Note that using vacation days does notprotect your streak; they only delay reviews. If a streak does lapse, you can optionally restore a recently-lost one for a small one-time contribution — one restore covers both your streak and your super streak, since it bridges the missed day itself.

Vacation days let you postpone your reviews when you need a break. When you use a number of vacation days, every review you currently have due is pushed forward by that many days — so you come back to a clean slate instead of a pile-up.

You get 28 vacation days per year, and they reset automatically on your account’s yearly anniversary. Pro subscribers have unlimited vacation days. You can use between 1 and 28 at a time from the “take a break” option on your review screen.

Note that vacation days do not protect your streak — they only delay reviews. Your spaced-repetition schedule resumes normally afterward: the system remembers each item’s original review date, so the spacing between reviews stays correct once you’re back.

Freezing a course pauses all reviews for that one course. Its flashcards stop appearing in your review queue until you unfreeze it. Nothing is lost — all of your learned vocabulary and progress are preserved. Freezing is a temporary pause, not a reset.

Freezing is per-course, so you can freeze one language while staying active in another. You can still learn new lessons in a frozen course; only the spaced-repetition reviews are paused. Toggle it from the course settings menu (🌙 freeze / ☀️ unfreeze). Freezing requires an active subscription.

Unfreezing is gentle: if reviews piled up while the course was frozen, the first one becomes due immediately and the rest keep their original spacing — so you don’t get hit with an avalanche.

Lots — and the catalog keeps growing. Browse the full list of courses on the home page and start any of them instantly.

We also publish free, in-depth grammar guides for many languages, which you can read whether or not you’re taking the matching course.

Some courses are built by humans. Others are built by AI, then validated by a second AI and refined continuously from real learner feedback. As you near the end of a course, new lessons can generate automatically — so the material keeps expanding to cover far more vocabulary and grammar than a typical textbook or other platforms.