Reviews

After you run PerfectPronunciation and do some exercises for the first time, the program remembers that you’ve done these exercises. It also remembers the grades you gave yourself for the exercises.

When you run PerfectPronunciation in the following days and click the Learn button, PerfectPronunciation will give you some “old” exercises to review. These are words that you have already learned to pronounce. The program asks you to review them so that you don’t forget them.

After each exercise (a first-time exercise or a review), PerfectPronunciation looks at the grade you got (and all the previous grades for this exercise) and answers the question “When are you likely to forget the pronunciation of this word?”. It calculates a date — for example: March 17. A short time before March 17, when you run PerfectPronunciation, the program will give you the exercise to refresh your memory. After that exercise, PerfectPronunciation will look at the grade again and schedule another review — and so on.

When you’re done reviewing the “old” exercises, you can do “new” exercises (if there are any exercises that you haven’t done yet). Of course, these newly learned exercises will also take part in reviews.

The last stage is the “final drill”, when you repeat the exercises (both first-time and reviewed) for which you got a poor grade (3 or worse). You repeat them until you can do each of them correctly.

In summary, a typical PerfectPronunciation session has the following stages:

  1. Review “old” exercises
  2. Do “new” exercises (learn pronunciation of new words)
  3. Final drill

You should run PerfectPronunciation regularly to review exercises. 2-3 times a week is good. Every day is ideal.

Optimization

Because PerfectPronunciation is based on the award-winning SuperMemo technology, the reviews of exercises are optimized. This means two things:

  1. Thanks to the grades you give yourself, PerfectPronunciation “knows” which exercises you will soon forget, and gives these exercises to you for review. In this way, PerfectPronunciation saves your time, because it doesn’t bother you with exercises you know well.
  2. In PerfectPronunciation, you review each exercise many times on different days. After each review of an exercise, you remember that exercise better. PerfectPronunciation knows that, and asks you to review the exercise less and less often. Because of this, you spend less and less time on reviews. In other words, the longer you learn with PerfectPronunciation, the less work you need to keep all the exercises in your memory. At first, you may need 30 reviews per day. After a month, you may only need 5 reviews.

For more information on the SuperMemo method, take a look at our general explanation of reviews in SuperMemo and our introduction to SuperMemo (both online).