@Ken1000 and @Paul_C Sorry for the very delayed response! Your question must have slipped through the cracks.
Here’s more detail about how Smart Review / spaced repetition works:
- https://help.practiceportuguese.com/article/52-how-does-smart-review-work
- https://www.practiceportuguese.com/learn-european-portuguese-with-spaced-repetition/
Each card has its own “path” – the time until you see that card again increases every time you get it right and decreases every time you get it wrong. At the beginning, it repeats again after just a few minutes, then a few hours, then a few days, then a few weeks, then a few months. The final level is when 6 months have passed and you still get that card correct. Then it is considered Mastered.
It’s up to personal preference how harsh you want to be when grading yourself, but I would say when in doubt, anytime you feel like you aren’t confident with a phrase, mark it as incorrect. For example, even if I get a phrase correct, if it took me a very long to think of the translation, I usually mark it incorrect because I know I need more repetition at that time. I wouldn’t want to wait even longer before seeing that phrase again because I think I would probably have forgotten by then.
But if it was just a minor mistake, I might mark it right. For example, if I translated it easily and probably would have been understood if I said that in real life, but just a definite article was missing, I would probably mark it right.
So it all depends on what your goals are. If you’re more focused on just getting your point across in a conversation, then be a little more lenient or only mark it wrong if it was so wrong that a listener would have been confused. But if you want to get better at the details, lean toward marking it wrong more often.
You can always change the levels on your Manage Smart Review page, if they don’t seem to match up to where you’re at. And just yesterday we added the ability to mark phrases as Mastered from the end of a lesson or Smart Review. That way if you already know it perfectly, you don’t have to wait for it to get all the way through the cycle. You can also add phrases to your Smart Review from the Shorties, Videos, Learning Notes, Blog posts, etc., or by searching on the Manage page.
Let me know if you have any other questions after reading those documents and I’ll try to respond much more quickly this time!