Our Approach to Spaced Repetition
Spaced repetition is an widely recommended methodology for vocabulary acquisition and retention.
We will make you keep practicing a word until you get it right each day. Like Gabriel suggests with his recommended Leitner Box technique, we don’t want to leave any cards at Level 1. We want to force you to be able to recognize it or recall it at least once.
We test you in increasing intervals for each card. Level 2 cards are tested after 2 days, Level 3 cards after 4 days, Level 4 cards after 8 days, and so on. If you forgot a card, it moves down to Level 1, and we’ll test you that day until you get it right and move it up to Level 2 again.
Gabriel does a brilliant job at explaining why this works: we don’t want to keep practicing the same cards over and over again since that eliminates the aspect of being challenged. We want to design the intervals such that it should be just challenging enough to push you every time we show you the card. (Read the book, there’s a much more detailed explanation in Chapter 2).
We keep track of practice intervals by card, not by level. Instead of having a certain day for certain levels, we keep track of when you last practiced each word and test you at the interval. Since we have a computer on our side, we figure this would be slightly more accurate than relying on the simplified Leitner Box technique.
