Are there any of you who have tried only using the Speed Review to stay familiar with words in a course?
I’m just getting back into a bunch of courses which I haven’t touched for varying periods and am trying to come up with a system to maintain all courses, even if they are not priority languages. I was thinking that I would maintain ‘non-priority languages’ by just using the Speed Review, but will this work?
I am not a big fan of Speed Review, to be honest, because I don’t think your brain has to work hard enough because all it has to do is choose from four options, not to actually produce anything. I remember a while back I reviewed a course I hadn’t worked on for a long while (a very big course, over 2,200 words in it) and when I did the regular Classic Review, I got way less than 50% right. Doing Speed Review", I got a much better score.
That said, if your aim in a particular language is just to be able to read it, rather than speak it, then revising the vocabulary via Speed Review might be enough.
I guess you will have to just give it a try and assess how effective it has been. I would be curious to hear how it goes!
I do this pretty often. I’m learning/repeating 5 languages and I really don’t have the time to review them all. For me it is good because the me the alternative would be to repeat nothing at all. So I focus on the language I currently need the most and do classic repeating there. And the others just speed review (especially if I didn’t do anything for a couple of days and the words to repeat added up).
Let’s say it like this: only doing speed reviews isn’t as effective than classic mode. As soon as I start using classic mode again, I’m doing more mistakes than using this from the beginning. But less mistakes than with doing nothing since not having them as a priority anymore.
Thanks for your responses. I agree that your brain doesn’t have to work as much with Speed Review. But as Salenca says, it’s a nice way to maintain “fringe” languages, when you are not actively learning them. For me the thought of getting through a normal Review of all of 800 words in two courses (one in a different script/alphabet) is quite daunting.
Anyway I will report back in some months 
Am curious to know how this ‘‘experiment’’ has gone 
hahah… So 3 months on… I have given up on it. Not as such because I am against it. But I feel like the level I have with the two languages in question (Tamil and Latvian) is not high enough to be able to maintain them in that manner (not the level, but the time spent speaking them).
My conclusion was that I need to invest the time to just “Classic Review” them. But what I did do was allow myself to do this just from the mobile app, which I feel is a lot easier than doing it on the computer.
I think if I am to finally arrive at a moment - where I am on top of all the languages I’d like to be on top of and don’t need to concentrate on more than 1, then I will maybe go back to trying to maintain them through speed review.
Too bad, but nice that you tried.
I recently reviewed a whole bunch of words, also a few hundred, and just made sure to use a lot of dead time in order to review them. It sure was a chore, but I think I remember the words much better now than if I’d used speed review.
Speed Review helps me identify the words for which the memories are still there, but need some refreshing to be clawed back. So, I do speed review, then I do classic review. Speed Review let’s me speed through words I already know.