Spaced repetition, properly: stop blowing up your queue
Most people do not forget words. They load too many, cannot finish the reviews, and quit. Here is how to actually manage the queue.
Vocabulary lists rarely fail because of memory. They fail because of queue management. Marking fifty new words a day looks diligent, but it pushes the review load past 150 entries, and that is where people collapse by day three.
Put a hard cap on the queue
The single most useful rule is no more than twenty new words a day. Around twenty is what a memory curve can absorb. Fewer costs you nothing. More usually means reviews pile up.
- Cap new words at 20 a day and push the overflow to next week
- Stop adding new words once the review queue passes 100
- Do not requeue a wrong answer later the same day; you will never finish
- Three correct answers in a row before a word counts as known
What to do when you get it wrong
Most people push a missed word back later in the same session. It then reappears constantly, eating time for little gain. Requeue it to tomorrow, or the day after, and let it actually decay before testing again.
Less and steady beats more and broken.
A simple test: if the queue stays manageable a week later, your settings are right. If you spend every session paying off yesterday's debt, cut the new words down.