The Smart Review is fabulous, and I believe essential for learning Portuguese. I have been using it every day for over a year, and I have a question for others who use it.
How helpful would it be to have more information from behind the scenes of how it operates such as:
How many questions are currently lined up for each day of the next 7 days - to allow us to plan our lives
Show a running balance of the number of questions remaining to be answered for the current day, as you go through them
How long will it be before a question is repeated if you indicate that an answer to a question is Right versus Wrong
Being able to add eg 7 days to all scheduled dates to allow you to go on eg a 7 day holiday or deal with some other life event without creating a huge backlog
I would think all these things can easily be done by simply accessing your personal database.
I see absolutely no advantage in the suggested enhancements…sorry Ken.
I have used the feature every day since it first became available. I never worry about how many phrases are outstanding. To be fully immersed in the language I am happy to be questioned on the “simple” everyday word as well as the complicated.
Hi Ken
I don‘t see the point of your suggestions.
I can do as much phrases as I want and end the flash cards whenever I want or just interrupt the series and go on later in the day.
Why should this interfere with my plans of the days to come?
Have fun with PP furthermore
Best regards Barbara
Ah I see. There seem to be two different ways of using it - either dipping into it occasionally or trying to reduce it to zero everyday. The spaced repetition concepts it’s based on the assumption that the student reduces the number to zero everyday, hence my concern for stopping the number getting out of control. But maybe people prefer not to think about the number.
Unless you have done Smart Review consistently from the very beginning, I think it’s difficult to get the number down to zero. I don’t worry about the number of sentences I have in my Smart Review. I think right now it is at almost 1200. Part of the reason for that is because I didn’t use the Smart Review the first year. Now I alternate between doing a lesson or Learning Note, and doing a Smart Review. At the end of a unit, I will spend a week doing Smart Review every day. I find my biggest problem in learning the language is remembering words, whether it’s nouns or conjugations of the verbs. I find I get a little more correct each time I see a statement in my Smart Review Flash cards, which I think is what matters.
I really like the Smart Review flash cards, and find it is a great learning tool to reinforce what you learned in lessons!
Hi Paula, and thank you for your thoughts ! I have been really bad at languages all my life but I now know at least 3000 PT words and growing - mainly learnt over the last year. The single thing that has done this for me is spaced repetition. It is the only way I can effectively absorb so much information and it’s scientifically proven. However it becomes ineffective if you don’t reduce the number to zero because the algorithm just won’t work, and furthermore I expect the number will keep growing because you will be marking so many answers as incorrect, and that’s horrible too. If you read about “spaced repetition” you will see why. I really would suggest stopping everything and creating the time to work on getting your 1200 down to zero and keeping it there. You will be amazed by how effective the smart review becomes - and how many more of your answers will be correct rather than incorrect. I do believe that it is the number one learning tool. Wishing you the best of luck.
I completed all the units well before Smart Review was born in its present form. I therefore have more than 2000 words to review and I am perfectly happy with that. I do smart units each and every day even on holiday. But as to the concept of reducing the level to Zero everyday? Impossible. Not even a natural born Portuguese speaker knows every detail of his/her language and many will make mistakes.
In life words and phrases crop up not in some ordered fashion with 7 days notice…but because they do!! Children learn not by some algorithm but because they do!
I measure my success not on badges or the number of words left to check but by the interaction with Portuguese whenever I visit. Every time I see that I am more understood and understand more but remain farfrom fluent.
I wouldn’t want to see much change, but I would value being able to easily see the number lined up for the current day. I currently start each day with some smart review time, but pull up after a round or two just to get a peak at the number remaining. I do this because I adjust my plans according the number I see. If there are only, say, 25, I start planning some verb conjugation revision, whereas if I see 250 I know I am going to be hunkered down in the smart review section for most/all of my session.
I aim to clear the outstanding review sentences every day.
I also try to clear the smart review cards daily. I try to engage several times per day so I get the cards in small bites and the numbers
are less daunting. I also sometimes stop after for example round 3 to see how many I actually need to complete in the day and structure my learning time round that. I know if I have recently completed a module there will be more to learn so do not complete more modules until I have become more proficient at the new phrases.
I would actually quite like to be able to suspend the cards for a short time for example when I am travelling so as not to accumulate a backlog but like many others I tend to do the cards even when I am on holiday.
I am delighted to know I am not alone in working through the cards everyday!
After reading this string of comments I looked through my Smart Review list, got rid of some phrases that I felt were not particularly useful during this phase of learning, and started working to get the list down to zero. In doing so, I found that I was getting much more out of this feature than when the number of phrases was so high, spaced repetition wasn’t really all that effective.
My study routine is often interrupted by work and travel, but the number of flash cards I have to review serves as a reminder to me how much I’ve been slacking and encourages me to work harder to get the number back to zero.
As a result, this has really become my “go to” study tool when I only have a few minutes between things and it makes me feel good that at least I’m getting that much done.