In an effort to optimize the review sessions, we've made a major change on how these work; one of the consequences is that a review session that used to take 30 cards may now only take up to 25 flashcards. The lower the number you see, the more this update increases the efficacy of your review session.
In the past, our review system would put related cards into the exact same review sessions. Before the change you might have gotten these 4 variations of sentence flashcards in a single session one after the other:
- The __ chases the cat.
- What's a 'dog'?
- The dog chases the __.
- What's a 'cat'?
Flashcards 2-4 are not too helpful as you just saw the answer five seconds ago, so you're not actually exercising your memory in any substantive way.
The new system pushes flashcards 2-4 into a future review session. If you have 23 completely independent flashcards due next, then we're only going to give you those 23 cards because those are the ones that are going to improve your language skill the most.
One of the consequences of this is that it makes the next review session feel really, really satisfying because a bunch of the flashcards in that session are going to be directly related to the flashcards in your last session... so they'll be easier and more exciting to answer, without being so easy that they are not useful (like the 4 dog/cat flashcards in a row that you'd get with the old system). This is the reason that you will be seeing fewer flashcards in consecutive review sessions.
Getting review sessions with only a couple of flashcards? No problem, that means that you’re actually making progress!