Definitely keep on going, but also definitely feel free to pause your progression until the current material sinks in. Just make sure to keep doing as much study as you would normally do, but there’s no point in progressing to newer content if you can’t retain your current content. Otherwise you’ll be wasting time trying to learn new stuff, you’ll forget most of it, and just become frustrated.

I saw this happen a lot with my English students (TESOL teacher).

Sometimes you have to slow down a bit to allow your brain to catch up, once that happens, you’ll be ready to continue, and you’ll feel much more confident doing so.

This will also have the added benefit of decreasing the workload in Anki as you increase the time between card reviews with the ones you are getting correct.

As far as the PDF introducing the new words go, you can still get something similar that should be just as helpful. Give this a go:

When you download a new deck and add it to Anki, don’t combine it with another deck yet.

First go to File->Export (or Ctrl+E)

For Export Format choose: Notes in Plain Text
For Include choose: The name of the new deck
And untick the ‘include tags’ box
Then click Export.
Save the file where you can find it easily.

Now you have a textfile containing all of the cards from that deck.
If you open it up with Word or Notepad, it’s going to look like crap.
Instead, do the following:

Open up Microsoft Excel (Hoping you have it. Let me know if you don’t).
Choose open file. Navigate to the appropriate folder.
In the bottom right change: All Excel Files to All Files.
Choose your file and click Open.

The Text Import Wizard will pop open.
Delimited should be selected.
File Origin should show: 65001 : Unicode (UTF-8)

This should all come out as the default settings, but change to these if it isn’t the default for some reason, and hit Next.

The next window should have Tab selected.
This is all we need, so hit Finish.

This should give you a file with four columns:

First = Kana
Second = English Meaning
Third = Kana
Fourth = Sound File Tags

Simply delete the third and fourth columns, adjust your column widths, and then you’re ready to go. ^_^

Anyone else who’s thinking about doing this, but it looks complicated, give it a go, as it’s really easy to do. And if you have any questions about it, either ask here or in my Anki Guide thread and I’ll guide you through it. If you don’t have Excel but want this, just let me know and I can give you some alternatives.

がんばってだってばよ！