Hi Mike,
Thanks for thinking about this and checking in with a potential solution.
This seems to be an implementation of the elsewhere suggested spreading out of the daily reviews in the “Review forecast”?
While I think there are benefits to the proposed system, e.g. people not feeling overwhelmed by seeing the reviews accumulate into the thousands, it kind of depends on the implementation on whether it might actually help address the issue itself. I could also see a disadvantage being, if you don’t see how many reviews you are building up in total, be it because you’re playing a lot of sentences, and/or have set your review intervals (especially the 100 % Mastered) too short (e.g. a couple of months, a month, or even less, I think I might’ve set it to 11 days at some point), you’ll miss the impact this has on the overall accumulation of reviews, and thus not be able to adjust your playing / reviewing / intervals accordingly.
However, I could imagine if there were an option in the Review Forecast, to play around with the number of reviews you’d generally maximally want to do per day (which can of course also change over time, as you are more busy or reach a more advanced level), which would indeed end up spreading them out as specified, this could definitely help give you an idea how many sentences played versus reviewed would make for a good balance, in order to not let them accumulate too much.
Ideally though, I would like to limit reviews from accumulating on the input (“playing”) side of things. I know there’s already a number of options, marking things as “100 % Mastered” or “Mark this sentence as known” (the “brain icon”), with shortcuts, but these don’t really serve my current needs.
However, for me personally the issue isn’t so much with limiting the amount of reviews, I think you can currently already limit the number of reviews in a playing round, if you’re playing and reviewing
My preferred solution, which combines with another issue I and others here have already voiced before, would involve being able at any step of the way be able to set a word as “easy”, “normal” or “hard”, and which would ideally adjust the number of times you’ll see that specific cloze sentence again (rather than a multiplier for the interval duration).
I realise this would be a lot more difficult to implement, and would probably make a mess of things like points etc. too.
However, currently it’s very hard to do this yourself in any way. I don’t really like using the “Brain” icon, because I like to “play” new clozes by using “Listening” mode for the first time I encounter them, and then use “Text input” for the reviews. Thus, it might feel from the “playing” (Listening) that I already know it, but I’d still like to encounter it later without the helpful giving of the answer, to see if that’s really the case, so marking it as “known” or 100 % Mastered doesn’t help me here. Such words I would just mark as “easy” though, and would ideally only see once or twice more ever, to verify that I do indeed feel like I’ve already mastered them.
For the “normal” words, I think the current provided intervals work fine.
Then there’s words that are difficult, which I’d like to see many more times than the currently available 4 intervals to complete mastery, and also much more frequently than having to wait for the 100 % interval, or having to set that interval to a lower value. Ideally I’d like at least 7-8 intervals for these. Currently I just have to keep manually resetting the % mastered to keep seeing them more often, and I also add them to a collection to have them more easily available for more frequent review.
Similarly, for the “easy” words, I normally manually adjust the intervals too, to limit my exposure to them, so I can focus more on the stuff I still want to learn.
Currently, in for example the Fluency Fast Track, I would say I have maybe around 85 % of the words being “easy”, 5 % “normal” ,and 10 % “hard”, meaning that for all but the 5 % I am manually adjusting the percentages mastered to increase or decrease the number of times I’ll still see them and when, which unfortunately is a bit of a pain to do with shortcut keys, because you have to “Tab” key through quite a lot of the fields in the pop-up to change the percentages.
So for me personally I guess an easy solution could also just be to be able to adjust percentages mastered more easily with a shortcut key combination for the intermediate percentages, rather than just the “reset” and “100 % mastered” or “Never” options currently available.
Tl;dr:
My feelings about the proposed solution:
Pro:
- Could help prevent people being overwhelmed by seeing huge numbers of reviews accumulate
Cons:
- Might obscure the effect of number of sentences played / review intervals set on overall number of reviews encountered (if total number of accumulated reviews doesn’t show anywhere)
- Doesn’t actually reduce the number of reviews.
Preferred:
- Have a setting in the Review Forecast instead that mimics this behaviour, but doesn’t enforce it (though perhaps this was already foreseen in the current proposal, in which case great, thanks
).
Alternative:
- Allow selecting “easy” / “normal” / “hard” while playing / reviewing from the start (ideally with different associated total numbers of review intervals for each, rather than a 100 % Mastered interval multiplier)
- (And/Or) Easier shortcut key combinations for intermediate percentages mastered (25 / 50 / 75 %), even if just implemented on the current “Edit sentence” (alt + d) screen.
Anyway, just my 2 cents, I realise I might be applying the current system incorrectly while playing/reviewing my cloze sentences, and might have misunderstood the proposed solution, and either way, whether any of this gets implemented or not, I still love Clozemaster even as is.
I personally don’t care about having thousands of outstanding reviews. I’ve been daunted by them at times, but never let it deter me (especially since the vast majority are 100 % Mastered, so don’t necessarily need to be re-reviewed any time soon if I don’t want). I realise some of my requests might be hard to implement, or make things too confusing for most users, I’m just giving my current super ideal dream scenario, but will be happy for it to remain a dream 
Thanks again mike and team for all you do, listening to us, and any changes made accordingly 