When you finish a learning session on the website, you are awarded some bonus points. One of them is for accuracy, which makes sense to me, but the other one is for “Speed”. I was wondering why that is. Why is speed relevant?
A second thing I was wondering about is how it is calculated. Sometimes it seems that finishing a learning session faster results in more points, other times it seems to result in fewer points.
Is there anyone who could enlighten me here?
of course it’s relevant: you can’t say you know a language if you need lots of time to make a sentence. Butdon’t rush while doing the excercises. Speed is a measure of your skill, but you shouldn’t try to race. Speed actually measures fluency. It comes with practice. If you get points for speed, it means your fluency improved.
TIP for a good speed, don’t do reviews when you have only a small number of things to review, otherwise you loose too much time
The basis on which those bonus points for speed are calculated is not set out anywhere but, as far as I remember from when they were introduced, it was simply a mechanism to reward the fast[er] input of answers during reviews.
The separate “speed reviews” (via the red button) were introduced later.
One thing worth remembering, though, is that all of the points we get are really just a bit of fun. We get the same points regardless of how hard the course subject matter is or how difficult each item is within each course. We get the same points for a single word answer (which could only be two letters or a single character) as we do for a phrase that is ten words long.
So, whilst we may use the course leaderboards as an incentive to learn more stuff- and that’s a good thing - they don’t tell the whole story. I would like to see a variation on the leaderboard which is based on how accurate we are when reviewing items.
well, i’m learning japanese via english, but english is not my native tongue … so, imagine
Of course 
My question was out of curiosity, not because I attach that much importance to how many points I obtain during a session. I certainly have no intention to try to optimize for speed, as I think accuracy is much more important.
In my case, I’m learning Chinese via English (which is also not my native language). During learning sessions, I will use a Chinese dictionary such as Pleco to look up the new vocabulary, find example sentences, compare with synonyms I have already learned etc. All of this obviously affects my speed. Yet I noticed that the number of points awarded for speed does not vary that much and doesn’t always seem to correlate with the actual time taken. Hence my question
I think ‘speed’ is based on your own average ‘speed’.