The controls can be toggled via the new button with a clock icon. When it’s not toggled on, the usual “Next” button is shown.
The “Reset” and “Known” buttons have been moved into these new toggle-able controls.
The “Master” button has been removed - the rationale is that these new controls decouple the % Mastered from the next review date so % Mastered is more an indicator of “number of times correct in a row”. So if it’s easy, you can push out the review date by choosing “Easy”, and if it’s really too easy, you can click “Known” so it doesn’t come up again / you can focus on other content. Curious about pushback on this change.
These controls will be available for every sentence, not just already 100% Mastered sentences.
The controls will be Hard = 0.5x default interval, Normal = default interval, Easy = 2x default interval.
Depending on feedback we should be able to have these controls out for the web within the next few weeks. We’re a bit slower on mobile app development at the moment, but as long as the web app change goes well we should be able to have them released for the mobile app as well within the next month or two.
If I accidentally clicked the wrong answer on a mastered sentence despite knowing the answer (for example, my cat walked over my keyboard), do I have to go through all stages again? Do I have to answer it tomorrow and in 10 days and in 30 days again? Or can I fix my mistake and set the sentence right back to 100%?
Edit: I just remembered @morbrorper’s idea which would be a solution.
Getting the Easy/Medium/Hard buttons the first time a sentence reaches 100% would be really nice. As for sentences below 100%… I can’t see myself using those buttons very often. If a word is hard, I just reset it to 0%.
Interesting. Assume you answer a new sentence in all four stages with “Hard”. Yes, you got it to 100% that way. But can you really say you “mastered” the sentence when coming up with the correct answer is still hard for you? And you only got the sentence to 100% because you halved the interval each time? This feels like cheating to me. An easy way out, sidestepping the forgetting curve.
Maybe it’s just quarreling about terminology (“mastered”) while the algorithm/logic is fine. Just do a few more rounds, and the problem sorts itself out. I just feel like a liar, saying I “mastered” something when I really haven’t.
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.
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!