So, I’m a Clozemaster newbie (1 month), learning Spanish from English. I’m doing about 200-250 sentences per day, usually about 1/2 review and 1/2 new. In one month, I’ve built a huge backlog of review, (>3,000). Primarily I’m doing fluency fast track, but also subjunctive/imperative/indicative sentences.
My goal (which I assume is pretty standard) is to maximize my retention of new vocabulary, and exposure to idiomatic language forms. Do you have a suggestion around optimal strategies? Should I go days of doing review only? Should I do more new sentences and fewer reviews?
And this is such a basic question, I assume it has been addressed before, but couldn’t find the thread through search. (Happy to just take a pointer to that if it exists.)
If retention is one of your main goals, doing many reviews definitely seems to be useful.
Personally what I found helpful is to adjust the days of the spaced repetition to my needs. You might test with them a bit if you want them to be lower or higher, depending on how easy or difficult you find it right now to remember what you already learned.
For me the backlog of reviews got too big so I couldn’t learn new words anymore, so I adjusted it to repeat less often.
You can change them with the cog right to “Ready for Review”.
Another thing for reviews which might be helpful for you to increase retention is to increase the difficulty for words/sentences you already learned from multiple choice to text input (or with listening even transcribe) if you not already have done so.
Though it depends if you want to use the language actively (in the future) or only passively and how much time and work you want to put into it.
At least for me those two helped.
Idiomatic language forms might be more difficult to learn effectively on here, unless there is a specific deck for it.
But you could favorite such sentences once you come across them, so it’s easier to review them later.
You’re doing way too many new sentences. Do something like 50 new sentences, 150–200 reviews. Or 25 new sentences and 175–225 reviews.
The opposite.
Example of the problem you run into when you do too many new sentences in relation to reviews:
On day 1, you do 0 reviews and 100 new sentences.
On day 2, you review the 100 new sentences from yesterday and add 100 new sentences.
On day 3, you review the 100 new sentences from yesterday and add 100 new sentences.
…
On day 12, you have 200 reviews to do: the 100 new sentences from yesterday and the 100 sentences from day 2 became due again. But you do only 100 reviews, so you now have a backlog of 100 sentences.
On day 13, you have 300 reviews to do: the 100 new sentences from yesterday and the 100 sentences from day 3 became due again and the 100 already in your backlog. But you do only 100 reviews, so you now have a backlog of 200 sentences.
and so on
When you do too many new cards, your backlog becomes unmanageable because in addition to the reviews from the day before, you also get those from 10, 30, and 180 days before on top.
In your case, now, yes. Go for a few days doing only reviews.
With a better ratio regarding new sentences and reviews, this is not necessary.
Thanks both to davidculley and Aki-kun for your comments. I am definitely going to change my use model, and possibly report back in this thread. While I clearly have to settle on a use strategy that works for me, I’m finding Clozemaster to be quite useful (especially in combination with ChatGPT for sentences that have grammar I don’t immediately see.) I do use only typing (not multiple choice) and finds that keeps my mind much more active.
I use a top-down approach: I decide about how much time I’m aiming to spend on each of the languages I’m doing and set my goals accordingly. I do a consistent number of new sentences each day and figure out a sustainable long-term balance point. This doesn’t necessarily result in getting all the way down to zero all the time, but I do see it once in a while.
My goal to keep my number of pending reviews about the same: right now on Esperanto (which I studied for several years before starting on here) I have about 400ish reviews per day. I do 20 new sentences per day to sustain 4000 points daily, which takes about half an hour. And the ratios change significantly on languages I know less well: my goal for Finnish is 2000 points per day but I can only keep up with 5 new sentences a day. (And I still have about 400 reviews pending.)
I would play around with the numbers until you find something that feels sustainable. If I start missing too many answers that’s usually a sign the backlog is too big and I need to adjust my approach. It’s an ongoing process!
I agree with @davidculley regarding new vs review ratio. I do 30-50 new sentences per day, depending on how much time I have and how much reviews are building up. And I do about 150-250 total sentences per day. Some days, I do some reading and those sentences are included in the total. They also count as new sentences by CM stats, but I do not count them towards my 30-50 new sentences goal as they do not come up for reviews.
When I came back to CM after a year long pause, I had 13K reviews to do. So just did reviews for a few weeks, and once I got them down, I started incorporating new sentences. At the beginning I tried to do 75-100 per day, but that was quickly building up a review backlog, so I dialed it down, and 30-50 new / 150-250 total on average seems to work out well for me once I got caught up on reviews. And this takes me about 30-50 minutes per day. (I timed myself several times and a 50-sentence round consistently takes me about 10 minutes)