- A miss shows the right form at once, which is when feedback helps most.
- The word comes back for a retry about ten minutes later.
- It also returns to your pages, so you meet it again in real sentences.
In spaced repetition, a miss is information
Spaced repetition is built to catch words just before you forget them, so now and then it is a little late and you miss one.
That miss tells the scheduler something real, namely that this word needs more time. Without misses it would simply be guessing.
The right answer, right away
Pashler and colleagues (2005) found that showing the correct answer after an error helps a lot, while after a correct answer it adds little.
So when you miss, the right form stays on screen until you close it, and you see the accents and the ending along with the meaning.
A retry ten minutes later
A missed word then comes back once within the same session, about ten minutes later. It is one short retry rather than a drill.
Nakata (2016) found that a single retry inside a session gives the best result for the time spent.
Back on your pages
NativeLingo stops swapping a word once you have met it about ten times or know it well, and a miss undoes that.
The word returns to your pages, so you meet it again in real sentences. Because the daily cap still applies, it never floods a page.
Reading helps here for a reason. Seeing a word helps you recognise it, whereas the review is what makes you recall it.
Why we don’t soften misses
A wrong answer always counts as a miss. It never counts as “hard”, since in the scheduler that means you remembered with effort.
If misses were softened, intervals would stretch for words you don’t know, and you would end up forgetting more, only later.
Questions
It shortens the next interval, but the word’s history stays, so it recovers faster than a new word would.
You probably missed it in a review, and it returns to your pages until it is steady again.
Yes. Mark it known in your word list and it leaves both the pages and the review.