What happens if, as a pro user, I set all 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% mastered review times to one minute then proceed to learn words with multiple choice?
I suppose that would be a faster way to grind up points, since instead of relying on long term memory, you’d only use short term one, and beside, you wouldn’t ever wait to get the rewarding +16 points.
I might try this on a language I have no interest in then delete the language from my profile so it keeps no track of it.
I am obviously aware this has no use whatsoever in terms of actually learning the language.
I’ve wondered that recently, since there seems to be a very high point scorer who hasn’t played many sentences compared to most people with high scores. I can only assume they have the sentences they have played set to very short review intervals.
I actually have the reviews on nearly all my courses set to 1 min except for 100% which I have set to 120 days or longer. The point is to have enough review sentences the following day and not to grind away. The problem I was constantly running into–and I wasn’t sure if it was a bug or by design–was playing with default review times resulted in me logging in the next day and having just a handful of review sentences, sometimes none at all, even when I did a lot of new sentences in the days before. It made me feel like I wasn’t getting in the repetition and practice I needed. Because I can sit here and do new sentences all day long and get them wrong and redo them until I get them right, but that’s not the same as when I see a review sentence and have that motivation to get it right the 2nd, 3rd or 4th time so it doesn’t reset to 0%.
With my custom review times, most of my courses have 200-2000 review sentences piled up and I may do 50-100 reviews plus some new sentences each day, sometimes double that, depending on my energy level and my study schedule for that day. And because of the backlog, I don’t necessary level up a sentence to 100% within 4 days. It can take a while before I see a single sentence enough times to master it–doubly so if I get it wrong. So there is a kind of space repetition with how I do my courses.
Also, I have bad insomnia so having a bunch of review sentences hanging around is nice when I need something to do at 2-3 AM in the morning.
But in relation to your question: in my experience, even when reviews are set to 1 minute, I don’t see them again before the next day, usually. It’s so rare to see them in the same day that when I do I assume it’s a bug or duplicate sentence. For example, today on the Japanese course, I did 100 new sentences, and since this is a new course for me and I don’t have a big pile of review sentences backed up on it yet, I had 189 review sentences, which I did all of, and none of the new 100 sentences showed up while I did those 189 reviews even though well over a minute had passed. (And out of the 189, I mastered 55, so those will go away for a while and tomorrow I’ll have 234 or so sentences to review, and that’s how I slowly build up a backlog of reviews so I’ll always have something to review the next day,) And honestly I hope that whatever makes it work like that stays that way, because this works for me. I would not want to see the same sentence over and over in the same session on the same day.
As for boosting your score, I suggest doing text input rather than multiple choice. If someone seems to be moving up the leaderboard quickly, that’s probably what they’re doing and I see nothing wrong with that. It’s more work so why not get more points out of it?
Interesting discussion. Personally, I have a bit of trust in the spaced repetition method of language learning, so I wouldn’t alter that rhythm fundamentally, regardless of the motivation. And, with respect to multiple choice vs text entry… I figure that text entry is the only way to go if one is really interested in learning the language. Sure, multiple choice may be a good option when you’re starting out with a new language pairing…or as a fallback when using text entry, in those occasions where you need help spelling it out (which happens from time to time for sure).
It teaches me to identify, not produce, a word. In other words, great for reading, terrible for speaking or writing.
More importantly, and this is a made up question to make my point:
Rubber is a _________ polymer.
airplane
picture frame
cross-linked
chicken
No way I am going to get that wrong because the other words are easily excluded. And with a randomized word selection (as is the only reasonable way to produce Clozemaster) this is far too often the case. Will I really have learned the correct answer?
@Ceid: interesting that you’d modify the settings so drastically. Also interesting to note that there is regarding the one minute rule too some kind of glitch… Not sure what’s up there.
Also, while in terms of absolute quantity of points text input rewards more points, it’s usually considered much slower, which is why in terms of points per unit of time I suspected it would be much less efficient.
@Romanophile@LessPaul I agree with both your points. I guess it depends what you use Clozemaster for (reading lots of sentences when you already have a large vocabulary?), but really in most cases you should really forget about multiple choice. The easy way out doesn’t help much here. In my case, I use it for Chinese but only because Clozemaster crashes when I’m drawing the characters directly on the app, so I draw them by hand (better anyway to remember them), then select the good multiple choice answer.
@Ilraon My multiple choice experience, I should qualify, is gained working on two Romance languages which are said to be pretty ‘close’ to English. For your experience with (the ‘distant’) Chinese, I have nothing but admiration… and if the multiple choice helps, then by all means, go right ahead…
I have different strategies for different languages, but whatever language I’m learning seriously will involve a % of text input.
First of all, I don’t think I’ve mastered a sentence after getting it 4x right, no matter multiple choice or text input. So, in the case of shorter decks (Georgian, Guarani, Estonian are critical for that) I was getting everything ‘mastered’ without actually having them mastered. No way I could wait 120 days to review a word in Georgian, in a deck with just some hundreds of sentences. Moreover, I don’t learn only the word being clozed, but the entire sentence which often involves more advanced language. So for these short decks I set reviews to short intervals so I have stuff to review. Weirdly it doesn’t seem to work for all decks. The number of reviews for Georgian and Guarani doesn’t seem to pile up even if I stay several days not doing anything, while that of Estonian and Catalan quickly escalated close to the total number of sentences at the deck.
I’m not a native SRS person and I’m not worried about when I’m reviewing this or that sentence. I complement my learning with native materials and I use Clozemaster rather as graded sentences reading. That’s why I like decks like Hebrew so much as they are really sorted by frequency/difficulty. So I feel no remorse when my decks explode at 6k-10k because that’s not the essence of my learning. I have a new-sentence learning moment at the day and another mass-review at the end when I’ve studied enough of the previous languages. That concurs to making my experience broader.
Thanks to that approach and to using mosly text input for intermediate languages, I’ve managed to actually use Clozemaster for production, not just for recognition. Even for languages which are low-hanging fruits for me such as Swedish and Afrikaans I’ve reaped good results by working exclusively on text input. It gets less practical for non-latin script - I can only do Mandarin, Greek and Russian on my phone and even though I can swype I still find it much more tiresome than typing so I haven’t engaged in mass-review sessions for non-latin languages. Even so I hold my case that this way has been working for my actual learning.
@Expugnator I’m sure no one thinks you’re artificially trying to rack up points - you’ve played nearly 300,000 sentences! You inspired me to take up a new language a few months ago, after you answered my question about how you managed to study so many.
@Ilraon I can earn more review points using text input than I can with multiple choice, as long as I’m on the computer and not my phone. The double points available for text input more than offsets the slight extra time needed to type out the words, if you’re a good typist! I only use multiple choice if I’m killing time somewhere on my phone and don’t want to tap away on a phone screen.