For anyone who did FFT of about 20,000 words, how long did it take you? I’m trying to at least do 1,000 points per day. Sorry if this has been answered previously. I did a quick search before starting this post.
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Unfortunately there is really no good way to answer this question.
By finish, do you mean see each question once, or do you mean promote each sentence to 100%?
Are you using multiple choice, or are you typing your answer?
And lastly, no one can predict how long it will take for you to learn 20,000 words.
Personally, even though I typically score 3 to 6 thousand points per day I don’t expect to have all 20000 words firmly memorized (typing) till I’ve been at it for over a year and a half. YMMV (your mileage may vary)
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if you are doing 1000 points a day, you will never probably never complete it if you are doing the reviews.
if you are just doing new sentences with no reviews, it will take 80 days (1000points/day / 4 pts/word ) = 250 words per day, 20k word /250 words/day= 80 days if you do multiple choice or 160 days with text input.
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Great responses, thanks.
It’s taken me 12 days to play about 8.28% sentences, so it looks like it’ll be another 5.8 months until I play all 20,000. But maybe slower, then, because of the reviews?
Still trying to figure out what my goal is. Playing all 20,000 seems like a good start.
Hm, wow!
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Still trying to figure out what my goal is.
How about whatever helps you learn the language best? 
Plowing through the entire collection of whatever sentences happen to be selected for FFT in your language pair without reviews means that what you see, and how long it takes, will depend entirely on whatever biases guided the people who contributed the sentences to Tatoeba and the people at Clozemaster who selected them. If half of the collection consists of “I love you”, “She loves you”, “He loves you”, and other near-duplicates, you will spend half your time relearning pronouns and the word “love”. By contrast, if you take advantage of reviews, the near-duplicates will fall out of your list quickly as you master them and you’ll be able to spend more time looking at the sentences with the words you know the least well. You may end up not seeing some near-duplicates of “I love you”, but you won’t be missing much.
I don’t think it makes sense to set yourself a goal until you’ve spent some time learning how long it takes for you to master sentences, what the set of sentences looks like, and how much language skill you’re acquiring. But when you do set a goal, I advise you to choose one that helps you learn best, even if it makes the goal calculation harder.
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Thanks!
May I ask how you use do reviews in FFT? I’ve let mine pile up so that I have 800+. My thought is by continuing playing FFT, the algorithm would make me review words from the past, but perhaps that’s not a good strategy. Perhaps I should catch up on my reviews before continuing?
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whether or not you do reviews depends on how important it is to continue to ingrain the words into your head. Doing all of the reviews can be a slog but it increases the chance you retain.
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If you don’t know the language very well, I think it makes sense to do all the reviews as they come up. That’s what I used to do. You’ll find it becomes easier and easier to reach 1,000 points a day once you’re earning extra points for reviews (up to 32 points per sentence), and your daily points will probably increase naturally. Repeating each sentence multiple times lets you play them both as sentences you read, and sentences you listen to for aural comprehension, which for me were vastly different things in the beginning.
If you already have a good grounding in the language and are just refreshing it, it might not be as important to do reviews.
Enjoy!
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Actually, playing all 20,000 is a loooooooooooooooot more than “a good start”. After spending over a year over the German fluency fast track (and very intensively during certain periods), I got a total of 10k cloze sentences. At that time, I could discuss with natives with decent success over complex issues, and I could read books extremely slowly granted I’d check words regularly in a dictionary. The shiny progress bar makes one feel like it’s a goal you can single out and carry out in a reasonable amount of time, but the name indicates otherwise: FFT literally means Fluency Fast Track, and as most people know, fluency is something most of us never achieve in our learning languages.
(Note that clozemaster was not at all the only tool I’ve used. I see clozemaster as the water that makes plants grow: using it alone makes little sense in my opinion)
On an other topic, don’t pay too much attention to the score. It goes extremely slowly at first, but much quicker when you do reviews. Thus it’s a motivation, but not in any way a reliable way to estimate how much you’ve worked in a day. (1000 worth of new words is a lot more tears and sweat than 1000 of 75% reviews)
About doing the reviews or not, I’m struggling with this issue as well. I think overall it’s more efficient to do them, but to be honest, you will almost certainly feel desperate at some point waking up and realizing you’re supposed to spend your whole day revising old sentences, most of whom you have little interest for anyway.
I think a more nuanced approach of trying to keep the review pile clean, but still learning a few new sentences daily, might work best to keep one’s motivation at the working level.
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