Flashcards

How to use

Make a deck, add cards under Edit cards or paste a batch in under Import, then revise. Press space to turn a card over and then say how it went — again, hard, good or easy, or the keys 1 to 4. Each button shows when that answer would bring the card back, so you can see the consequence before you press it.

What the scheduling actually does

Cards are scheduled with the SM-2 algorithm, the one behind SuperMemo and Anki. Every card carries an ease factor starting at 2.5. Answer well and the gap until the next review multiplies by that factor — one day, then six, then six times the ease, and so on, so a card you know keeps stepping further into the future. Answer badly and the card resets to a one-day interval and its ease drops, which makes it come back more insistently from then on. The ease never falls below 1.3, or a single bad day would put a card in front of you forever.

The point is that you only see a card when you are on the verge of forgetting it, which is when reviewing does the most good. It also means a deck goes quiet for days at a time — that is the algorithm working, not the tool breaking. Cram mode ignores all of it and drills the whole deck, which is the right tool the night before an exam and the wrong one for actually remembering anything a month later.

Where your decks are kept

In this browser, on this device, and nowhere else — there is no account and nothing is uploaded. The flip side is that they are as fragile as any browser storage: clearing site data removes them, private windows forget them when closed, and another device will not see them. Export anything you would be annoyed to lose.