Studying

Overview

The app uses spaced repetition to decide when you should see each card again; cards you struggle with appear more often and cards you've mastered appear less often as you keep answering them correctly.

A study session walks you through a set of cards using tests like multiple choice, typing, and listening. Your answers are tracked per card and used to update each card's schedule. You earn points for every test you complete, with bonuses for maintaining a daily streak.

The mode you pick determines which cards enter the session and how they're scored: Learn introduces new cards; Review covers cards already on a schedule; Practice lets you drill any cards without affecting their schedule; Difficult focuses on cards you've been getting wrong; and Speed tests you against a timer.

How Spaced Repetition Works

Behind the scenes, the app uses an algorithm called FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler) to decide when you should see each card again. Every card has its own schedule based on how well you've been answering it.

Each time you complete a card's tests, FSRS assigns one of four ratings based on how you answered:

Higher ratings push the next review further into the future, while lower ratings bring it back sooner. Over time, cards you consistently know well appear less and less often, while cards you struggle with keep coming back until you've mastered them.

How this rating is determined depends on your grading mode. See Grading for details.

Cards move through four states as you study them: new (never studied), learning (being introduced), review (learned and on a schedule), and relearning (previously learned but failed and being re-introduced). Each time a card in the review state is answered incorrectly, it counts as a lapse, which is a long-term counter that tracks how often you've forgotten a card across all sessions.

<div class="my-6 rounded-md border border-border bg-muted/30 flex items-center justify-center aspect-video max-w-4xl"><p class="text-sm text-muted-foreground">Deck overview page with study mode modal open</p></div>

Getting There

The "Study" button opens the study mode modal. It appears on every deck card on the Decks page and at the top of each deck's overview page.

Starting a Session

The study mode modal shows five modes to choose from, along with card counts for each:

Modes with zero available cards are disabled and show a message explaining why, like "All cards learned" or "No cards due for review".

Section Filter

If your deck has sections, a dropdown at the top of the modal lets you filter by section. Each section shows its own card counts (new and due). Select "All Sections" to study the entire deck, or select a specific section to study that section by itself.

Active Session Banner

If you have an unfinished session for this deck, a banner appears at the top of the modal showing the mode and current progress. You can resume the session or end it to abandon your progress and start fresh.

<div class="my-6 rounded-md border border-border bg-muted/30 flex items-center justify-center aspect-video max-w-4xl"><p class="text-sm text-muted-foreground">Study mode modal with section filter and active session banner</p></div>

Study Modes

Learn Mode

Learn mode introduces new cards you haven't studied before using a two-phase approach: first you see each card's front and back to familiarize yourself, then you're tested on what you learned.

In the learn phase, cards are shown one at a time with both the front and back visible, along with any custom fields, images, and audio. For each card, you have three options: move to the next card (Enter or Space), mark the card as known (K), or mark it as difficult (D) to flag it for extra practice later in Difficult mode.

Pressing K marks the card as known, skipping its remaining tests in the session and persisting it as learned with an FSRS "Easy" rating, which schedules its first spaced review accordingly. K also works during any standard test (multiple choice, typing, listening), where it short-circuits the remaining tests for that card and applies the same Easy rating. K is not available in Speed mode.

In the test phase, after viewing all cards in a batch, you're tested on them. Each card receives three tests, with the mix of test types drawn from whichever you have enabled (multiple choice, typing, listening). Tests are ordered from easier recognition (multiple choice) to harder recall (typing, listening), and the test phase continues until every remaining card has completed its tests or been marked as known (K).

Cards are studied in batches. After completing one batch, the next batch of new cards begins with its own learn and test phases. Batch size is configurable in your study settings.

<div class="my-6 rounded-md border border-border bg-muted/30 flex items-center justify-center aspect-video max-w-4xl"><p class="text-sm text-muted-foreground">Learn phase showing a card with front and back visible</p></div>

Review Mode

Review mode tests you on cards that are due for review based on their FSRS schedule. Unlike Learn mode, there is no learn phase and you go straight into testing. Your performance on each card updates its schedule: cards you answer well get pushed further out, and cards you struggle with come back sooner.

Each session starts with the most overdue cards, up to the per-session limit set in your study settings. Studying regularly keeps your review queue manageable. Skipping days causes reviews to accumulate.

<div class="my-6 rounded-md border border-border bg-muted/30 flex items-center justify-center aspect-video max-w-4xl"><p class="text-sm text-muted-foreground">Review mode test in progress</p></div>

Practice Mode

Practice mode lets you re-test yourself on cards you've already learned without changing their spaced repetition schedule. Like Review mode, there is no learn phase in this mode; you go straight into testing, using the same test types you have enabled for review mode (multiple choice, typing, and listening, depending on your deck and settings).

The key difference from review mode is that your performance here does not update each card's review schedule. Practice mode pulls from the same pool of learned cards as review, but it ignores due dates and never pushes cards further out or brings them back sooner based on how you do. You can run practice as many times as you like without affecting your spaced-repetition intervals.

Points are still earned normally for correct answers, just like in other modes.

Practice mode is useful when you want extra reps on a deck without affecting its schedule: drilling through cards when nothing is currently due, revisiting older cards that haven't come back around yet, or running through a deck freely without any schedule consequences.

The difference from Review mode is simple: Review uses your answers to update each card's schedule, which is the whole point of spaced repetition. Practice ignores the schedule entirely, so you can run through the same cards as often as you want without changing when they next come due.

Difficult Mode

Difficult mode focuses on cards you have flagged as difficult during study sessions. Like Learn mode, it includes both a learn phase and a test phase.

You can flag any card as difficult during a session by pressing D or clicking the "Mark as Difficult" button. Once flagged, a card stays in Difficult mode until you unflag it during a session.

<div class="my-6 rounded-md border border-border bg-muted/30 flex items-center justify-center aspect-video max-w-4xl"><p class="text-sm text-muted-foreground">Difficult mode session with a card marked as difficult</p></div>

Speed Mode

Speed mode is a fast-paced challenge that tests you on cards you've already learned. It uses multiple choice only, with a countdown timer and a limited number of lives. Like Practice mode, Speed mode does not update each card's FSRS schedule, so you can run it as often as you like without consequences.

Each question has a time limit (defaults to 10 seconds). A progress bar shows time remaining, changing color from green to yellow to red as time runs out. You start with a set number of lives (defaults to 3), shown as heart icons. Each incorrect answer or timeout costs one life, and the session ends when all lives are lost.

Speed mode is great for reinforcing vocabulary quickly and testing recall under pressure.

<div class="my-6 rounded-md border border-border bg-muted/30 flex items-center justify-center aspect-video max-w-4xl"><p class="text-sm text-muted-foreground">Speed mode with timer bar and lives indicator</p></div>

Test Types

There are three test types, and you can enable or disable each one per mode in your study settings.

Pressing 0 during any test submits the answer as incorrect. The card is reinserted later in the test queue (see Failed Card Retries), counts as a lapse if the card is already in review state, and is scheduled by FSRS to come back sooner.

Multiple Choice

Pick the correct answer from four options; one option is always correct, while the other three are pulled from other cards in your deck.

Press 1, 2, 3, or 4 to select an option, or press 0 for "I don't know" (which counts as incorrect). After you answer, the correct option is highlighted in green. If you chose incorrectly, your selection is highlighted in red.

<div class="my-6 rounded-md border border-border bg-muted/30 flex items-center justify-center aspect-video max-w-4xl"><p class="text-sm text-muted-foreground">Multiple choice test with four options</p></div>

Typing

Type the answer yourself in a text field, then press Enter or click "Check Answer".

The app accounts for minor typos (one character off for longer answers) and handles diacritics based on your diacritic mode setting. After you answer, feedback shows whether you were correct and displays the correct answer for comparison. If your answer was correct but had a minor typo or missing diacritics, it still counts as correct, but a "watch your spelling" warning appears with the input highlighted in yellow. You can also press 0 for "I don't know".

<div class="my-6 rounded-md border border-border bg-muted/30 flex items-center justify-center aspect-video max-w-4xl"><p class="text-sm text-muted-foreground">Typing test with answer feedback</p></div>

Listening

Listen to audio and choose the correct answer from four options. If you have "Auto-play audio" enabled in your study settings, the audio plays automatically when the test appears; otherwise, click the audio button or press A to play it. After playback finishes, press A again at any time to replay. While audio is playing, A has no effect.

Select your answer the same way as multiple choice: keys 1 through 4, or 0 for "I don't know".

Listening tests are only available for cards that have audio on the front. If a card scheduled for a listening test doesn't have audio, that slot is swapped for a multiple choice test instead so that the card still receives its three tests.

<div class="my-6 rounded-md border border-border bg-muted/30 flex items-center justify-center aspect-video max-w-4xl"><p class="text-sm text-muted-foreground">Listening test with audio play button and options</p></div>

Character Bar

When using the typing test for languages with special characters or diacritics (Spanish, French, German, and others), a character bar appears above the input field. Click any character to insert it at your cursor position. This makes it easy to type accented characters without switching keyboard layouts.

<div class="my-6 rounded-md border border-border bg-muted/30 flex items-center justify-center aspect-video max-w-4xl"><p class="text-sm text-muted-foreground">Typing test with character bar showing special characters</p></div>

Note on non-Latin scripts: The character bar only covers Latin-script diacritics. Languages with non-Latin scripts (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Greek, Thai, Hindi, and others) require an input method installed at the operating system level. Once enabled, you can switch between keyboards while typing in the app.

For guidance on enabling additional keyboards or input methods on your device, visit the official support site for your platform and search for the phrase below:

• Apple Support — search for "add input source" (macOS) or "add a keyboard" (iOS / iPadOS)
• Microsoft Support — search for "manage input and display language settings"
• Google Support — search for "add a language to Gboard" (Android) or "manage keyboard languages" (ChromeOS)

Keyboard Shortcuts

Failed Card Retries

If you answer a test incorrectly, the card is reinserted later in the test queue so you get another chance. It keeps coming back until you answer it correctly or press K to mark it known.

Right after a failed test, the learn card view appears as a refresher before the session continues.

<div class="my-6 rounded-md border border-border bg-muted/30 flex items-center justify-center aspect-video max-w-4xl"><p class="text-sm text-muted-foreground">Learn card refresher shown immediately after a failed test</p></div>

Grading

Every completed card receives an FSRS rating (1 to 4) that determines when you'll see it next. How that rating is determined depends on your grading mode, which you can change in your study settings.

Auto-Grading (Default)

In auto-grading mode, the app determines your rating based on two factors: whether you answered correctly and how long it took you to respond. Incorrect answers always receive the lowest rating (Again). Correct answers are rated based on response time, where faster answers receive higher ratings. The time thresholds vary by test type since some types naturally take longer than others; typing requires more time than selecting a multiple choice option, for example.

In this mode, the rating is applied automatically after each test without being shown.

Self-Grading

In self-grading mode, you choose the rating yourself. After answering a test correctly, a rating bar appears with four options:

If you answer incorrectly (including by pressing 0 for "I don't know"), the card is always rated "Again" regardless of grading mode. The rating bar is not shown in this case, even in self-grading mode.

Self-grading gives you direct control over FSRS scheduling. Rather than having the app infer a rating from your response time, you rate your own recall after each card, which is a traditional spaced-repetition workflow familiar from tools like Anki.

<div class="my-6 rounded-md border border-border bg-muted/30 flex items-center justify-center aspect-video max-w-4xl"><p class="text-sm text-muted-foreground">Rating bar with Easy, Good, Hard, Again buttons</p></div>

Session Completion

When all cards are done (or all lives are lost in speed mode), you're taken to the completion page.

<div class="my-6 rounded-md border border-border bg-muted/30 flex items-center justify-center aspect-video max-w-4xl"><p class="text-sm text-muted-foreground">Session completion page</p></div>

Points and Level Progress

The top of the completion page shows points earned during the session. Points vary by test type:

A level progress bar shows how close you are to your next level. See Levels for how levels are derived.

Session Metrics

Two metrics are displayed alongside your points: accuracy (the percentage of tests you answered correctly), and time (the total duration of the session).

Card Review

A scrollable card review section shows every card from the session with its test results, the number of retries if you answered incorrectly, and a "Difficult" label if the card has been marked as difficult.

Deck Leaderboard

A mini weekly leaderboard shows your ranking on this deck compared to other users who have studied it.

Next Steps

The bottom of the page shows a button for each study mode with cards remaining, labeled with that mode's count, plus a button to return to your decks.

Resuming and Abandoning Sessions

Resuming

Leaving a session before finishing (by closing the tab, navigating away, or losing connection) saves it automatically. You can resume from two places: a resume chip on your dashboard with the deck name and mode, or the active session banner that appears when you reopen the study modal for the deck.

On resume, cards you've already completed are skipped; the session picks up with the remaining ones.

Abandoning

To end a session early, click the "X" button in the study header or press Escape; a confirmation dialog then asks you to confirm. Abandoned sessions don't earn points or affect your streak.

Starting a new session for the same deck also abandons any existing unfinished session for it.

Points and Streaks

Points

Points are earned for every test you complete during a session and the amount depends on the test type (see the table above in the session completion section).

Levels

Levels are derived from your total accumulated points across all sessions. Each level requires more points than the last, with a cap at 100.

Your current level appears on your Profile and on the session completion page after each study session.

Streaks

Your study streak tracks consecutive days of studying. Completing at least one session in a day extends your streak, while missing a day resets it to zero.

Your current streak is shown on the Dashboard. Your best streak (all-time longest) is shown on the Progress page and on your Profile.

Streak milestones earn bonus points:

The streak bonus applies to every session you complete while your streak is at or above that milestone, not just the session where you hit it. Once your streak crosses a new milestone, the bonus steps up to the next tier.

Study Settings

Study settings let you customize how sessions work: cards per session, batch size, enabled test types, grading mode, and more. You can set global defaults and override them per deck.

For full details on every study setting, see Settings > Study Settings and Settings > Per-Deck Settings.

Tips and Troubleshooting

No cards available for a mode? Each mode pulls from a different pool. Learn mode needs cards you haven't studied yet. Review mode needs cards that are due based on spaced repetition timing. Difficult mode needs cards you've flagged. Speed mode and practice mode both need cards you've already learned at least once.

Review queue growing too large? This happens when you skip study days, causing reviews to accumulate. Try studying smaller batches daily rather than large sessions infrequently. Consistent daily review keeps the queue manageable.

Typing test marked your answer wrong but it looks correct? Check for diacritics. In strict mode, accented characters must match exactly. Switch to lenient or ignore mode in your study settings if diacritics aren't important for your learning goals. Typo tolerance is also only applied to longer answers (more than a few characters), so a one-character difference in a short word still counts as wrong.

Session not resuming correctly? If a resumed session seems to start from the beginning, the session may have been abandoned (either manually, or by starting a new session for the same deck). Abandoned sessions cannot be resumed.

Speed mode ending too quickly? Increase the number of lives or the time limit per question in your study settings. The defaults are 3 lives and 10 seconds per question.

Want to focus on specific sections? Use the section filter in the study mode modal to study only cards from a particular section of your deck.

Answered correctly but earned no points? Points are only awarded for tests rated Good or Easy. In auto-grade mode, a correct answer that takes too long is downgraded to Hard and earns nothing (the cut-offs are roughly 6 seconds for multiple choice, 8 for listening, and 15 for typing). In self-grade mode, rating yourself Hard or Again also skips points for that test. Rate yourself Good or Easy, or answer a bit faster in auto-grade.

"Too many sessions created" error? To prevent accidental hammering, you can start at most 10 study sessions per minute. Wait a moment and try again. This limit resets on a rolling 60-second window.

Started a large Speed session but it ended earlier than expected? Speed mode draws at most 100 cards per session regardless of deck size, to keep sessions tight. Run another Speed session to continue through the rest of the deck.

Related

• Decks covers creating and managing your flashcard decks.
• Settings > Study Settings is where you configure study preferences and per-deck overrides.
• Progress shows your study history and statistics.
• Leaderboard is where you compete with other learners.