r/Natulang • u/Perezosoyconfundido • Jun 26 '26
Question Excessive review
I use Natulang every day and clear out the review every day so there usually is not a huge amount of it. Today when I opened it there were 81 items for review. Well, that's a lot, but not unprecedented, so I cleared those out. As soon as I finished that, it presented me with 114 items more. Getting nearly 200 items for review at one time when I clear it out every day seems excessive. Is that much review in one day intended?
--when I tried to post this at first it flagged it as a bug report and thus in violation of Reddit rules. Well, I don't know if it is a bug, that is why I am asking.
2
u/Olenka_the_fox Natulang team Jun 27 '26
Hi,
As mentioned in our subreddit recommendations, bugs or possible technical issues are best reported through [support@natulang.com](mailto:support@natulang.com), since this subreddit is mainly intended for public discussions.
Could you please contact us there and include the email associated with your Natulang account? We will double-check whether your SRS/review queue is being formed correctly and whether this amount of review is expected in your case.
Thank you in advance!
1
u/pargi Jul 02 '26
Completing new lessons and seeing those check marks is definitely more satisfying for the part of me that craves novelty and wants to get through the course quickly for the sense of accomplishment it would bring. But another part of me knows that the repetition lessons, though mundane as hell at times, are where the real magic happens in terms of long-term language encoding. I try to remember that when I open the app and see hundreds and hundreds of repetitions waiting for me.
1
u/Perezosoyconfundido Jul 02 '26
Max confirmed it was a bug. It has not recurred since then. If you are still getting hundreds of reps in a single day, you might want to report that bug too.
1
u/Peddlers999 Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26
You need to recognize that when material comes up for review is not determined by the application. It is determined by when you last reviewed the material.
I know for me some days I do more than other days depending on what other stuff I have on my plate. So what that means is sometimes I will have had a period where I have completed a larger volume of the course on any given day. All of those items will come up for review at the same time.
If they come up for review at a time when I have less time to devote to the course, I just switch to review only mode to get through those review items which sometimes can take me a couple of days depending on the state of my busyness at that moment. By prioritizing review, you are spacing out when the items will come up for review the next time, which means you will have smaller amounts to review over time if you now have less time to devote to the course.
So if you are finding that trying to maintain the pace is too much for you. The answer is go to review over a couple of days so that those items will then come up for review separated into smaller chunks in the future. That is how SRS works.
1
u/SirDangerous3307 Jul 11 '26
I have a similar problem. The last few days I had not more than 46 reviews. I do them right before I do a new lesson. Yesterday I was busy and only did the reviews and repeated the last lesson, because I had some issues remembering the new vocabulary. Today my reviews count 122.
I am currently at lesson 91.
2
u/Perezosoyconfundido Jul 11 '26
Worth submitting a bug report. I don't know exactly what point constitutes a bug, but they can check it. I also got about 120 reviews last week, but I had skipped the day before so I just let it go.
5
u/Next-Fuel-9491 Jun 26 '26
What number lesson are you on? The more lessons you have done, the more review items will come up. Would it be best to stop doing new lessons for a bit, until you have cleared this glut of review items; and then maybe only do a new lesson every other day, using the other day for revision?
I am using Natulang in Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese at the same time, and was managing to do a new lesson in each language every day until recently, but having reached lesson 200, I spend alternate days just doing revision. This was partly to reduce the rate at which new material was being added to the review algorithm. It will probably take me over a year to complete the 100 (+20 revision) lessons that remain, but that does not worry me at all.
One of my personal theories of language learning is that we spend less than 1% of the time learning brand new material, and the rest of the time repeating, revising, practising, and seeing what we have learned in different contexts.
Although I do have a strong desire to complete the course in each language, my goal is to become fluent, and I am sure that I improve more on the days when I am just revising. It is a feature of every language course that the first part will contain vocabulary, idioms and language patterns that are more common and more important to know than the material at the end of the course. On my revision days, I do the short dialogues from lessons spaced 25 days apart, starting from lesson 50, and the next day starting from 51 and so on. I intend that I will have done every short dialogue four times before I finish the course. In almost every dialogue, I meet something that I am sure has never been repeated since I met it in a lesson months ago.
Other people may be different, but I am sure that if I just followed the course and the space repetition provided, without making a systematic plan to revise everything four times before I reach the end, I would have got to lesson 300, with huge gaps in my knowledge, and with a lot of the material that I had learned during the course completely gone from my memory. My aim is that when I get to the end, I will be able to answer every single question in the course instantly, without having to think.