On the web, “speed” review stays at a steady slow pace. This seems like a bug. Please let us know if it is an intentional design change.
5 Likes
it is a bit slower indeed; I think it is an “intentional design change”, as many peepls complained about.
1 Like
I like the change.
Tried it for my Duolingo PT BR course by MartinPen on Firefox V52.9.0esr which I am learning here since two years.
I can confirm that it finally works better now 
The first time I could actually finish a speed timer session (I failed 2-3 others).
1 Like
I don’t like the change. Sure, I can now finish reviewing all 100 words in a session. But the previous version, going faster and faster, pushed my brain to not just review what I had already learned, but to actually get better at quickly processing the foreign language clues to just go ahead and grab a word. Speed review wasn’t just review, it was a tool that tended to move those words from beginning to intermediate usability.
Like when you first learned as a child to read in your native language, there’s a lost of slow-paced phonetics, sounding out the words, using prefixes and suffixes to make sense of what you’re reading. But to be a fluent reader, your brain has to learn to process most words as sight words.
1 Like
I’m in two minds about it. On the one hand I agree with @lurajane. On the other hand, for the official Chinese courses, speed review (before this change) got pretty unfair, very fast. The benefit of practicing to parse language quickly is kind of lost when it’s being done using (verbose) pinyin instead of what is actually used in real life: the characters. The other issue is that the next question has already appeared when the audio repeats your answer from the last question, making it very distracting, even more so when it doesn’t play immediately (often there’s a pause, I assume for downloading). The slow speed mitigates this issue.
Maybe keep the speedup mechanic, but allow the max speed to be tweaked on a course-by-course basis? And find some way to ensure that the audio is cached so it always plays immediately at least.
Edit: I should mention this is all on the web version, not sure if the experience is different on mobile. Also I remembered another weird quirk: when you simply let the timer expire, it would reset back to the slowest speed. However if you actually chose an answer and it was wrong, the speed stayed the same (as far as I could tell).
Hi - This is an intentional change, and will also be appearing on mobile. This change was made to make it easier to complete speed review sessions, which was previously very difficult, especially with longer phrases. Feel free to provide any comments or feedback on this thread.
4 Likes
@memrismatty
Hi Matty,
I could already try your new timer for your offical Portuguese BR 7 course where I had a zero backlog (no reviews).
Finally I have (a bit) more time to read the 4-8 answer options when your offical courses introduces phrases or even longer sentences.
This never had worked before with your old code.
Question:
Is the timer auto-adjusting yet to single words vs 3+ word phrases vs (much) longer sentences?
For only single words and 4/6/8 answer options it could maybe be a little bit more faster.
Thank you for the information! Really appreciate it when Memrise communicates about changes.
1 Like
How about an option for the web & app to let us choose between the former and current speed?
For older courses, i realy loved the former speed, as it helped me recognize the words i have allready learned on a very fast “quiz-game like” way.
For new words, i am happy with the current speed, as it let me read it twice before i choose the answer.
tldr;
Let us choose the speed, pretty please!
1 Like