How Spaced Repetition works in Mandarin Mosaic.

Mandarin Mosaic uses a spaced repetition algorithm to help you refresh your Chinese vocabulary at just the right interval to maintain your memory. Let's cover what spaced repetition is and how to get the most out of it in Mandarin Mosaic.

What is spaced repetition?

Spaced repetition is a technique used when reviewing flashcards that increases the rate of learning and makes more efficient use of your study time.

With Spaced repetition, new information is reviewed more regularly and information you know well is reviewed less often. This is particularly efficient for language learning because it allows you to focus your study time on words you know less well.

When you learn a new word, it will likely be forgotten if you don't review it regularly enough. The time it takes to forget a word is strongly related to how many times you've seen or used it. Spaced repetition aims to make you review words just as you're about to forget them.

Spaced repetition in Mandarin Mosaic

When you first start using Mandarin Mosaic, you'll be asked what level your Chinese vocabulary is currently at. This can be set based on your HSK level. Mandarin Mosaic will estimate which Chinese words you already know and how well you know them.

When you study a sentence in Mandarin Mosaic, the sentence is split into its constituent words and the amount of times you've seen each word is tracked. Mandarin Mosaic will increase the spaced repetition interval each time you see a word.

Word reviews in Mandarin Mosaic

Words that you haven't seen for a while are marked for review according to the spaced repetition algorithm. On the main lessons screen, under the "Reviews" category, you can find a "Words to review" pack, which will generate sentence examples for the words that you need to review.

The "Words to review" pack is a focused lesson that shows you sentences containing words that our spaced repetition algorithm recommends you should review.

The sentences in this lesson can come from any pack, but since the goal is to review words you already know, you'll mostly see sentences without new words.

During this lesson, words that you need to review will be highlighted in purple so that you can focus your attention on them.

You should try to keep the number of words to review as low as possible before learning new words.

Spaced repetition difficulty

On the settings page, you can change your spaced repetition difficulty and pick one of four levels: Super easy, Easy, Medium and Aggressive. The default is Easy.

For those with a busy lifestyle and who want to do the minimum number of reviews possible to retain their Chinese vocabulary, we recommend picking Super Easy.

This will be up to the user's preference, but if your count of words to review is already low and you want further reinforcement of your vocabulary, then you can increase the SRS difficulty to a higher level. This is useful for remembering more advanced and rare words such as Chinese idioms (chengyu).

Overall the effect of using spaced repetition while sentence mining is a huge advantage over graded readers and will help you to grow your mandarin vocabulary confidently whilst also retaining higher level words.

More on sentence mining

Now that you're ready to start sentence mining, read more about Mandarin Mosaic on our home page and try out the only specialised app for Chinese sentence mining today.