- Each new word a day adds about ten reviews a day a year later.
- 5 new words a day settles at 7–10 minutes, while 20 a day takes 27–40.
- If reviews pile up, NativeLingo pauses new words instead of moving dates.
New words are cheap. Reviews are not.
Adding a word takes a second, but keeping it takes reviews spread over months, and although the spacing grows, it never stops.
Do the math with the usual interval growth and 90% retention, and after a year each new word per day costs about ten reviews per day.
What each goal turns into
These are the numbers after a year, once the load has built up, which is why every goal feels easy in the first weeks.
The Anki manual gives the same rule of thumb: twenty new cards a day lead to about two hundred reviews.
How to pick
So when you decide how many new words to learn a day, start from the minutes you will really give it on a bad day rather than a good one. A goal you keep beats a goal you drop in March.
Five a day is a good default if you read most days, ten suits people with a deadline, and twenty is for people who treat this as a second job.
At twenty a day NativeLingo aims a little lower on retention, 85% instead of 90%, so intervals get longer and the load drops to about 135 reviews.
When you fall behind
Miss a week and reviews stack up, and NativeLingo counts a review as debt once it is more than a day late.
If the debt passes two days of normal load, new words pause. At a goal of ten that means more than 200 overdue reviews, and Today tells you why.
Due dates stay where they are, because pushing them back would hide exactly the words you are forgetting. Clear the debt and new words come back on their own.
Questions
Yes, in settings, and since dates you already have don’t move, the load changes gradually.
Seeing a word doesn’t move its schedule; only the typed review does.
Pick five new words a day, which after a year settles at 7–10 minutes.