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Using Spaced Repetition to Master European Portuguese

You can think of spaced repetition as a tool that keeps you from losing your hard-earned Portuguese skills. After putting so much effort into understanding the grammar behind possessive pronouns, learning that irregular verb conjugation, and finding the most useful European Portuguese phrases, it can be frustrating when something you used to know has suddenly vanished from your memory. It’s so rewarding to move forward (completing another lesson, checking off another unit, etc.) that many learners forget it’s just as important to “go backwards” and review! 💡

What’s the Best Way to Remember What You Learn?

In school, I’m sure many of you stayed up late the night before a test, cramming all of the “learning” into one marathon study session. Maybe you got a good grade, but how much of the material were you able to remember a week later? Probably not much!

Without adding some kind of repetition to your learning, memories quickly fade. However, if you try to repeat too much at once, your brain either gets bored or overloaded. 🤯

So How Do We Hold Onto Memories Longer?

Portuguese spaced repetition online practice

What’s too much? What’s too little? How often should you review?

Let’s say you’re trying to learn the word cãodog . You sit down and review it 50 times in a row: cão, cão, cão, cão, cão… This is very easy for your brain. You just saw the word a second ago, so there’s no effort involved in continuing to recall it.

Now, imagine you only review it once or twice, then you don’t see it again until the next day. Your brain now has to work harder to find this memory amongst millions of other pieces of information it ingested over the past 24 hours. “What was that word…? I know it started with a c… Oh yeah! Cão!” Making the retrieval process more deliberate is what helps to store long-term memories.

Timing is Everything

The best time to review something is actually right before you are about to forget it. This tells your brain, “Hey, don’t lose that! It’s important!” You train your brain to retain this piece of data, instead of discarding it. Over time, this strengthens the neural pathways that keep information ingrained in your memory and easily accessible.

These ideas are all part of spaced repetition. This effective learning strategy involves reviewing regularly across gradually increasing intervals, which adjust based on your performance on each individual piece of information. You review the difficult things more often, and the easy things less often. The time in between grows longer and longer each time you successfully recall something.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Knowing a language is one thing, but being able to use it spontaneously in conversation is another. This is where quick recall plays an important role. Studies show that you need to know about 10,000 words to be considered fluent in a language. You couldn’t possibly practice 10,000 words per day, or even 500! This is why consistent practice over the long-term is essential. Spaced repetition helps make that process more efficient and less ambiguous. Who doesn’t want to learn more with less time and effort? Plus, when you have more “go-to” phrases and vocabulary available, it frees up a lot of mental energy to focus on other aspects of the language, making conversations in Portuguese less stressful.

Applying Spaced Repetition to Your Portuguese Learning

Trying to use this Spaced Repetition technique to learn Portuguese on your own can be quite complex. That’s why we’ve used these principles to design a new tool called Smart Review (because “Magic Sticky Long-Term Memory Machine” was too long!) Our goal is to strengthen and speed up the connection between your memories and your mouth, so to speak. (Pun definitely intended.)

There are two different options for reviewing:

1. Flash Card Mode

Flash Card Mode is the recommended way to review because it gives you the challenge of producing Portuguese on your own with no hints or structure. You are forced to recall and/or formulate a sentence, instead of just recognizing the right answer. Here’s how it works, including a few keyboard shortcuts using the arrow keys that make reviewing more efficient:

  1. See the phrase in English
  2. Translate it out loud (or in your head) to Portuguese
  3. Flip the card to see a correct translation ( ➡️ right arrow )
  4. Check yourself: Was your translation right or wrong?
    • ⬅️  left arrow = wrong    ➡️  right arrow = right

Keep in mind that with this method there can be multiple correct translations, so you should be comfortable with taking a more independent approach. For example, if the phrase was “please” and you answered se faz favor , but the translation showed up as por favor , you could still mark yourself correct because you know that both are acceptable translations.

Try it out

2. Quiz Mode

If you’re not quite ready for the no support, self-guided approach, we also have Quiz Mode which utilizes the same activities as the lessons (multiple choice, listen and type, fill in the blanks, etc.).

Try it out

How Does It Work?

Smart Review keeps track of every phrase you’ve added and automatically determines the ideal intervals and frequency, to help you gradually commit these phrases to your long-term memory.

Instead of having to go back through each lesson on your own, you can keep the most important words and phrases fresh in your memory by doing Smart Review on a regular basis. Our spaced repetition system takes care of the details behind the scenes so that you can focus on having fun learning European Portuguese.

That said, we know everybody likes to learn a little bit differently, so you also have plenty of options for customizing your reviews:

Add to Smart Review

As you work through the Units, each lesson will end with a list of the phrases you just learned. If you want to add one to your Smart Review, open the menu on the right and click Add to Smart Review. Add phrases you think you’ll use in your real life, or that you think are the most helpful examples, and skip those that are less relevant. This lets you create a completely personalized review experience. ✨

You can also add phrases from the Learning Notes, Blog posts, and from the Vocabulary / Expressions tabs of the Shorties, Podcasts, and Videos, using the same menu.

Are there phrases you want to add that you haven’t come across yet? On the Manage Smart Review page, click the + Add Phrase button in the upper right. Here, you can search our database or search by Unit to add as many phrases as you’d like.

Manage Smart Review

When you add a phrase, it automatically starts in the “New” level and gradually works its way up as you review it again and again. Inside the Manage Smart Review page, you can tweak your phrases to influence when and how often they appear in your Smart Review tool.

The colourful bar along the top represents each level. And the same colour appears to the left of the phrase to indicate its current level. Here’s how a phrase progresses:

  • New: After adding a phrase, it will be ready to appear in Smart Review within 24 hours. Once you’ve successfully reviewed it a few more times, it will enter the Short-Term Memory level.
  • Short-Term Memory: After successfully reviewing the phrase over the course of a few weeks, it will graduate into your Long-Term Memory.
  • Long-Term Memory: Now it will appear for you to review a few more times over the next few months. If you continue to successfully recall it, it will become Mastered.
  • Mastered: By the time a word or phrase reaches this stage, you should be able to recall it easily, even if it’s been a long time since you last reviewed it.

If the Smart Review button appears on your main Units page, that means you have phrases that are “due for review”. As you continue to review over the long-term, your phrases will gradually (and automatically) move up through these categories until they are Mastered. But you are free to make these changes manually if you feel a phrase is in the wrong category.

At the end of Smart Review sessions, you will also have the option to go through the list and Mark as Mastered or Remove from Smart Review, if needed.

Custom Reviews

You can simply review using the sessions we’ve created for you, based on the spaced repetition intervals for your phrases. Or, you can create your own custom reviews by visiting the Manage Smart Review page, checking off phrases, and clicking the Review button above the list. You can even filter by unit if you want to review a certain topic.

I’ve been reviewing a lot! Why is the number of phrases “due for review” still going up?

We used to add ALL phrases automatically, so if you’ve been a member for a while, you might have a large backlog from this. (Or, if you added a lot of phrases, but don’t get around to reviewing very often.)

We know it’s overwhelming to see thousands of phrases to review! But don’t worry so much about the number. The most important thing is to get into the habit of doing regular reviews to help your brain store what it’s learning.

Here’s why the number fluctuates… The system keeps track of your performance on each phrase. Each time you get one right, it waits a little bit longer before showing you that phrase again in Smart Review (i.e. when it’s due for review). At first, this interval is very short — it will add the phrase back to your review right away to help you store it in your memory. But then, when you get it right a second time, it will wait longer before adding it to your review again, and even longer the next time, and so on.

Eventually, the phrase will graduate to Short-Term Memory, then Long-Term Memory, then Mastered. (This means the phrases “due for review” can come from any level.) In the beginning, there will be a lot of phrases due for review because they still have short intervals until you get each one correct a few more times.

The goal is that eventually you can remember each phrase even if months have passed before you saw it last, suggesting that it’s truly “Mastered”. These increasing intervals are designed to help your memory by showing you the phrase right before your brain would normally forget it, to help keep it “active” in a sense.

If you’re discouraged by the high number, keep in mind that you can use that Manage Phrases section, as well as the final screen of a Smart Review session, to mark any as Removed or Mastered.

Give Spaced Repetition A Try!

Portuguese spaced repetition review tool button

In short, Smart Review helps you keep your hard-earned skills from fading. We hope you find a good place for spaced repetition in your European Portuguese tool belt, along with our other content and your real-life experiences. If you’re already a logged-in member, you can use these links to access it:

Once you’re logged in, when you have phrases to review, a button will show up inside your Units page. You can also access Smart Review from the Learn menu along the top of the page.

>>>Not a member yet? Learn about the other Membership Benefits, or Sign Up Now 🇵🇹❤️

Comments

  • Love this new tool. It forces me to think in Português when forming the sentence. I have spent a few days now doing the review and it’s really helping me remember. So Thank you.
    Regards
    Liz

  • WOW…these are REALLY helpful..They show me how much I need to go back and review a few things. YIKES!

    • I think the Units are an ideal place for a beginner to start. You can see a list of the units available to members here: https://www.practiceportuguese.com/units/main/. I would recommend using Smart Review regularly as you work through the units because it’s helpful even for beginners to review what you’re learning. You could start with “quiz mode” instead of “flash cards” if you want something a little easier as you get started. I hope that helps!

  • I was playing with flash cards and was randomly marking the correct and incorrect. Desculpa. I didn’t know yet what is the idea. Is there a way to reset to square one?

    • No worries, it shouldn’t have affected things too much because all your phrases are still in the early levels. They will all come up again and everything should correct itself based on your next few sets of responses. 🙂

  • Hi,
    There is one thing more that I would like to have but I don’t know if we have. I wonder if we have an option that I could review things on selected chapters. I normally review on my notebook everything that I would learn yesterday or days before because I need to recall it right away. However, I don’t see that option when I try to manage my flashcard bank.
    Again, thanks very much for updating our flashcard tool.

    • This will be part of the upcoming changes we’re making. So as of Monday February 21, you will be able to search and review by unit. After that date, visit Manage Smart Review and you’ll see the Search by Unit option on the right. Then you can select the phrases that appear and click Review. You can also add phrases by unit, using the Add Phrase button in the upper right.

  • I’m so thankful you have the Smart Review set up so that we don’t have to do anything except use it. I’ve never had the organizational skills to set something like this up in other languages I’ve learned. Of course spaced repetition does help enormously in being able to speak fluently sooner. It’s like practicing music – if you don’t practice until small words and long sentences come out naturally, your performance will always be at the amateur level.

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