I have tried various strategies for moving Clozes to “Favorites,” but nothing seems compelling.
So far I have tried:
Random entry based on my preferences. >> result: not optimally functional for learning.
Using “Favorites” for 100% Mastered words – using it for pure vocabulary entry (while I use listening for everything else). This is a fantastic way of checking I can recall Clozes not just by aural recognition, but that I can create the grammar or vocabulary from scratch. >> result: worked great until I got to around 2000 Favorites, then unworkable.
What do people do that works? Do you have a system you love? Please share!
I’ve messed around with the Review intervals a bit, and had ended up setting them far too shortly, especially for 100 % mastered (I think it was around 10-20 days, or 30 at most), so at some point I was drowning in thousands of reviews. Then I thought perhaps I should be “ignoring” them, if they’re 100 % mastered, and I do know them well enough, but I wasn’t really happy with that either. After having made a huge effort to finally obliterate my review queue, I now use the following system:
Listening mode for playing new words (0 → 25 %)
Vocabulary mode with Text Input for the reviews (though sometimes I’ll use Listening mode to get the 25 % mastered reviews up to 50 % still)
If I reach 100 % mastered for a word, but I still don’t feel I know it well enough, I “reset” it to 0 % mastered
If after re-reaching 100 % mastered for these more tricky words, I still don’t feel comfortable with them, I add them to a custom collection I have for this purpose, which keeps it much more manageable. I actually have two such collections; one for “Expressions” (since there the translation is generally useless), which currently contains just 13 sentences, and one for the other words requiring extra practice, which currently contains 88 sentences.
I’ve only switched to this system recently, but so far I’m quite happy with it.
My typical day is : listening mode - new sentences 90 minimum to 180 max in the morning by the rounds of 30. Typically every single sentence goes to favorites. In the evening I open my favorites batch saved from the morning and put it into a speaking mode and go through the same batch again. Typically I have a “residue” of around 30 absolutely new words, which I leave in favorites for the next day or a couple of days. When I feel I know them, I un-favor them and put in 100 percent, confident I will see those words again in different sentences. It works for me because the majority of “new” sentences contain familiar words , and I am going to do my FFT at the end. My system leaves me minimal reviews which makes me happy. Those humongous review dumps almost made me quit the CM, I was so overwhelmed.
I use favorites!!! I find them useful. Italian is my 2nd language, I have been studying it for 4-5 years, off and on.
When I encounter a sentence with a unique word order, I save it to favorites. Italian often has a different sentence structure than English; it’s not enough to just know what every word means.
When I see a word that my brain easily mistakes for another one, I send it to favorites.
If I see ANYTHING AT ALL that I don’t understand, or can’t translate myself, I save it to my favorites, and bring up the list to ask a native speaker the next time.
Sometimes, I’ll easily guess the cloze word, but there will be another word or combination of words in the sentence that will be new to me. Then I’ll save it to favorites.
Sometimes, I’ll have a sentence 75% mastered, and for some reason, I’ll realize that when it’s ready to go to 100%, I don’t have it memorized properly that day. Maybe it took me an extra moment to dig that word out of my head. If it’s not already set to favorites, I set it to favorites, and knock it down to 25%. I’m VERY picky about this; I will not set a cloze to 100% unless I am confident that I can answer it within a second or two.
In my head, I know that my favorites lists are full of sentences that are in some way difficult for me or peculiar, and deserve extra attention. So sometimes, maybe once every two weeks, I will play my favorites out in radio mode and try to repeat them with the proper pronunciation. This is extremely useful for me: being able to select sentences for the distinct purpose of setting them aside to give them extra attention.
I don’t know how practical my approach to “favorites” is because by now I have thousands of favorites.
I know that other people (for example, @morbrorper) use favorites very differently: They add the sentences they couldn’t answer correctly to their favorites (instead of resetting it to 0% as I do), then practice their favorites at the end of their session, and unfavorite all favorites afterward. If I understand that strategy correctly, they treat their favorites almost like an “inbox zero” that they bring back to zero every day. That way they can keep their wrongly-answered sentences at 50% or 75% (since the word they struggled with will appear in multiple more sentences, which seems to be enough repetition for them) and avoid slowing down their progress.
I, on the other hand, am very picky, like @Vito89. I don’t keep a sentence at 75% and neither would I set it to 100% if I didn’t know the answer immediately. Like, @Vito89, I’ll knock the sentence down back to 25% or 0%, which throws me back and slows down the progress bars from filling and becoming entirely green quite a bit, and it increases my heap of reviews to do. Maybe I’m a bit masochistic, but I like hammering new/difficult concepts into my head until I really (finally) understand them.
With my approach, I know that my “favorites” consist to 100% only of sentences that, at some point during my language learning journey, I found difficult. Be it for a weird word order or whatever. Like a buffet where I can pick anything and know it once was hard or still is hard. Unlike every other collection, which consists mostly of easy or normal or usual sentences, without anything unusual about them, that would be boring to play if I picked a random sentence from it.
I find @morbrorper’s strategy also very intriguing and maybe one day I’ll switch to that strategy. Today, it wouldn’t work for me without doing some extra work of first saving all the sentences I found difficult and collected over time, somewhere else. Maybe in a custom collection. I don’t really make use of custom collections thus far. Maybe it’s time I start.
At this point, I’ve (almost) mastered all collections up until the 5000 most common words, the fluency fast track until about that same point, the various grammar collections about pronouns, prepositions, et cetera. I think you can get pretty far with knowing the most common 5000 words. Before I move on to the next collection to learn the words 5000–10000 I’ll probably focus on just my favorites for a while. And remove those that I no longer find difficult. (Some of my favorites are from the beginning of my journey, from the 100 most common words collection.) That approach won’t land me anywhere at the top of the leadership board for the foreseeable future, since favorites give only 2 points. But I’m here to learn the language, not to win some imaginary game.