- Pulling a word out of memory keeps it, while looking at it again barely does.
- Typing tests spelling too, which matters for words you read.
- A miss shows the right form at once, which is where feedback pays off.
What the 2008 active recall study found
In 2008 Karpicke and Roediger taught students a list of foreign words, and once each word had been recalled once, the groups split.
One group kept studying the list while another kept being tested on it. A week later the studying group remembered 33–36% of the words, and the testing group remembered about 80%.
The extra studying felt productive but added almost nothing, because the extra active recall did the work.
Recall a week later; the studying group kept 33–36%. Karpicke & Roediger, 2008.
Why “I knew it” is a look, not a recall
Many flashcard apps show you the answer and then ask how well you knew it, so by the time you rate yourself you have already seen it.
That button records a feeling rather than a memory, since your memory never had to produce anything. In the terms of the study, it is just another look at the list.
So NativeLingo shows the word in your language and waits for you to type the translation, and nothing is revealed until you answer.
Typing also checks spelling
Nakata (2016) compared typing an answer with picking it from options, and typing won wherever the learner needed to know how the word is written.
You meet NativeLingo words on the page, with your eyes, and in the next article you need to recognise their spelling, which is exactly what typing trains.
How the review grades what you typed
A wrong answer never counts as “hard”, because in the scheduler hard means you remembered with effort, and mixing the two would stretch intervals for words you don’t know.
What happens when you miss
Pashler and colleagues (2005) found that showing the right answer after an error helped a lot, whereas after a correct answer it changed little.
So after a miss, the correct form stays on screen until you close it, while after a hit you get a short check mark and the next word.
The page shows you the word, and the review is where you learn it.
Questions
No. The review only accepts typed answers, because typing is the part that makes words stick.
It counts as correct and you see the accented form, but miss the accent twice in a row and it counts as hard.
Most days a minute or two, and the time grows with how many new words you add each day.