This issue also already exists for 50% and 75% Mastered sentences. There’s a way to set the % Mastered by clicking the button with the pencil icon after answering.
So to answer your question - you could fix the mistake in the same way to set it back to 100% Mastered. Does that seem reasonable? @morbrorper has also suggested making the % Mastered check marks top right clickable - that’s being considered as well.
Good to know - thanks!
Good point / thanks for sharing. So to be sure, you’re thinking these controls are best suited just for sentences that are 100% Mastered?
Your guess was correct–I thought I would see these options for all the exercises once I had enabled it. I just need to be patient! Thank you for taking the time to answer.
I think perhaps I made a mistake here–I cannot duplicate that anywhere. I thought I had tracked certain sentences to see how long it had been since I had reviewed them, but when I try to do the same thing I am not getting the same result. I will keep experimenting and if I can create the same result I will post it. Most likely I made a mistake, and apologize for having wasted everyone’s time. I’ll be more certain in the future before I post. I also just got a pop-up telling me to combine responses into a longer reply. I will be sure to do that also in the future. I am off to a bad start with the etiquette of the site, but I will try to do better with that–and in the meantime I’m enjoying using the site a lot.
No worries at all! You’re doing great Thanks for the follow up. If you are able to reproduce, or you notice any other issues, please let us know of course. Here is fine, or emailing hello@clozemaster.com is the fastest way to get a response.
I like the basic idea. The one thing I’m not sure about is this:
Currently, I’m using the option “Use an always increasing next review interval with Hard/Normal/Easy buttons after answering to modify the rate of increase.” I like it, and I’m not sure I want to see it taken away. If anything, I would rather settle for the second option (setting the next review to 50/100/200% of the 100% Mastered review interval setting). At least that way, I would have more control; making the interval dependent on the default review interval setting would mean I had very little. Can the behavior be made configurable in this regard?
I think/hope this is what mike meant. So you’re talking about the same thing.
“Hard” results in half the “Normal” interval for the according stage (0%, …, 100%)
“Easy” results in double the “Normal” interval for the according stage (0%, …, 100%)
the “Normal” interval is whatever you configured it to be (doesn’t have to be the default 0/1/10/30/180 days)
I think what Mike meant was that “Normal” serves as default/baseline, regardless of whether you actually use the default values (180 days) or custom values. The word “default” was used in two different contexts.
I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other.
I don’t have a problem when we get these controls only after getting a sentence to 100%, as it’s now. From my perspective, it could stay the way it currently is. But that’s just my opinion, of course.
But I also wouldn’t mind if we’d get the controls even on 25%, 50% and 75%. I personally don’t need it. But who knows, maybe it turns out to be surprisingly useful in reducing the workload (pile of reviews). After all, the most efficient strategy in spaced-repetion learning is to make the interval as long as possible, and review the card just right before you’d have forgotten it. This avoids unnecessary repetitions. The new feature could prove more efficient than my current strategy (resetting sentences I find hard back to 0% as @keiths22 does), which surely goes against the strategy I just described and results in potentially unnecessary repetitions and thereby workload.
I’m kind of torn whether I personally would find it useful on 25/50/75% or not. I guess I will let democracy do its job and let the majority decide. You could do a poll @mike.
Giving more options to the users is generally a good thing, aside from potential clutter on the interface and the opportunity cost of development. You said it would take a few weeks to roll out, which I interred (possibly incorrectly) to mean that this would not be a simple change to implement. If for some reason it’s easier to implement the change only for 100% mastered sentences than for all sentences then personally I’d vote for that because I see don’t see much utility in having this option available for the lower levels.
When I have a batch of sentences where the buttons are available, I find it a bit distracting to have to think about which one to click each time and whether it’s better to mark the easy ones as known forever. It interferes a little with the flow. But it’s still worthwhile to do it because the choices I make will have a huge impact on how many reviews have to be done in each future month, and clearing easy words out of the way is important so that I’ll continue to have enough time available for learning new words.
But at the lower levels there just isn’t that same payoff. I’d just be shifting sentences around by a few days. What really matters to me is the total number of times I see a word, not the exact intervals between them. So what will happen is that I will just click the same button almost every time because it’s simply not worth thinking about. And I’ll continue to reset the hard words to lower levels so that I’ll see them more total times and more frequently.
Actually, I have a suggestion for how this might work better. If the system can remember the difficulty level that you previously assigned to the sentence and keep it unless/until you change it, that would cut down a lot on how many clicks you’d need to make (because you’re probably keeping the setting the same most of the time). Then I’d be more likely to use the feature on new sentences. But if I have to find a button to click after every single sentence I play, then it just doesn’t seem worthwhile.
edit do add: I’m approaching this from the standpoint of doing text entry, where I’m pressing enter once to submit my answer and a second time to go to the next sentence. That’s really quick and convenient, and adding some other step is annoying. For multiple choice it wouldn’t matter as much.
The interface would still look like today, with only the “Next” button. The other buttons would show only if you explicitly click the clock icon. Meaning the visual clutter is hidden behind a toggle and you never need to see it if you don’t use it.
I think pressing Enter would correspond to clicking “Normal”, so there’s no additional step. As it currently is for 100% mastered sentences.
After having followed the discussion this far, I am mostly in favor of the proposal to extend the easy/normal/hard buttons to partially mastered levels, but I have one question: When you talk about the ability to toggle the controls with a clock icon, do you mean that this toggling will affect sentences with all nonzero levels of mastery (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%) together? And how “sticky” will it be? If you’ve pressed it once, will you continue to see the easy/normal/hard buttons for all nonzero levels of mastery until you press it again?
Also, I strongly encourage you to add a keyboard shortcut for the toggle operation.
Thanks for all the input! Work in progress - if you’d like to test it out, once you’ve clicked Play and started a round, add &nextReviewControlsEnabled=true to the URL and press enter to reload the page. Then you should see something like
I find it a bit overwhelming, at least up to 100% mastered. If I’m having a hard time recalling a word at 50%, halving the interval will probably make it easier to recall next time, but isn’t that just cheating? For better learning in the long run, I would like to easily reset the mastery level, not to zero but to the previous one. Even with the new design, I still have to open the edit screen to do that.
Depends on whether your goal is to efficiently learn a language or to outsmart a gamified ranking system to become rank one in a leaderboard.
The goal in spaced-repetition learning is to view a card just slightly before you’d have forgotten it.
Wait any longer and the word is no longer part of your vocabulary.
Show it more often and you do unnecessary work.
If you want to learn the language and the regular interval is too long, and halving the intervals means that the card is viewed closer to when it needs to be viewed, then that serves the purpose.
Nonetheless, this can be misused by people who only want to beat their competition in the leaderboard. Halving the intervals means they get to the point where a card gives 16 rather than 4 points quicker than people who play honestly.
I’m mature enough to not care when someone has more imaginary points than I have. But I can see how others would get frustrated because they’re beaten in the leaderboard all the time by others who don’t play honestly.
Although I believe, if your goal is to cheat, you can already accomplish that simply by changing the default values (1/10/30/180). You don’t need a “Hard” button to get to a card‘s 16-point-state quicker. Perhaps some people don’t know that and the “Hard” button will be obvious enough for them to cheat when they previously didn’t/couldn‘t. So it could be that cheating gets slightly worse but not by much, I’d bet.
I’ve been using the nextReviewControlsEnabled flag for some time now, and I think it’s good enough to be enabled for everyone as the standard interface.
Alternatively, how about only two buttons, one to double the time to the next review, and one to reduce it with a third? This would make it very easy to adjust the date nearer to one’s exact liking. (This isn’t easily done in the app, as the buttons annoyingly simply double or halve the interval.)
If you combine this with clickable percentage buttons it would be a great improvement over the current web interface.
Another thing about the nextReviewControlsEnabled flag: it seems it doesn’t do fuzzing of the next review date, which is a shame if true (this is difficult to verify).
Yeah, I think the more options we can choose from in the settings for review, the better. Better yet, if we can customize how these review intervals (and their modification sentence by sentence, rate of incremental increase, etc) can be set entirely by hand.
Thanks for the follow up. If you are able to reproduce, or you notice any other issues, please let us know of course. Here is fine, or emailing 
Any and all feedback welcome!