How to answer a flashcard
A review scheduler knows a great deal about forgetting and nothing whatsoever about you. Its only evidence is the button you press after each card. Press those four buttons carelessly and the cleverest algorithm available will schedule your words wrongly, politely, for years. This page is the five minutes that prevents that.
A review is a test, not a reminder
The card shows one side and waits. Before you tap to turn it over, produce the answer — silently or out loud, but produce it, whole, the way you would have to produce it in a sentence. Then turn the card and find out whether you were right.
The temptation is to flip immediately and read both sides, which feels efficient and teaches you almost nothing. Recognising an answer is easy and shallow; dragging it out of memory is difficult and is the entire point. The moment of blankness before the word arrives is not wasted time — it is the work.
There is one honest exception. If the word is genuinely new to you, do not sit there straining. Look, read the example, answer Again, and let it come round in a few minutes.
The four answers, and what each one does
Every card ends in one of four buttons. They are not grades, and there is no wrong one: you are reporting what just happened in your head, and the schedule is computed from the report. The app writes the next interval on each button before you commit, so you can see what you are choosing.
- Again — you didn't remember it. The word comes back in a few minutes, in this same session, and the schedule for it starts over.
- Hard — you got there, but slowly. It comes back sooner than it otherwise would have.
- Good — you remembered it. This is the ordinary answer and the one to reach for by default; most of a healthy session is this button.
- Easy — it came instantly, with no hesitation at all. The word then waits much longer before you see it again.
Again and Good are the two that a session is almost entirely made of — the word came back or it didn't — which is why they sit together under your thumb. Hard and Easy are shadings for the cases where neither of those is quite true.
The two habits that wreck a deck
Using Easy to get through the queue. Easy does not dismiss a word. It pushes the word months into the future and tells the scheduler that this one is settled. You will meet it again long after you have forgotten it, answer Again, and the algorithm will have learned something false about how you remember. If you knew it but had to think, that is Good. Easy is for the word that was already on your tongue.
Using Hard as a gentle Again. Hard means you retrieved the word. If you looked at the answer and thought ah, of course, you did not retrieve it, and the honest button is Again. Softening that answer to protect a streak costs you the word later.
Both mistakes come from treating the buttons as a score. They aren't. Nobody is marking this, the deck is not a record of how clever you are, and an evening of honest Agains is worth more than a week of flattering Goods.
What makes a card worth answering
Folioki writes the card for you when you save a word — the translation, an example sentence, the sentence you actually met it in, the word's forms and its pronunciation. That takes the tedium out, but a few decisions are still yours, and they are the ones that decide whether the card survives.
- One idea per card. If answering it correctly means producing three separate things, it is three cards, and you will fail it for the wrong reason.
- Keep it short. Save the phrase that was hard, not the whole paragraph around it. A shorter card is the one you will still answer in a month rather than skip.
- Keep the sentence you found it in. It is already on the card. Leave it there: the context is most of what makes the word retrievable later.
- Edit anything that reads oddly. The translation and example are written by a language model and can be wrong. You can rewrite a card yourself, or ask for a better example — and a card you have corrected once is a card you understand.
When a card keeps failing
Every deck grows a few words that refuse to stick — you answer Again, and again, and the word cycles round forever. After eight failures by default, Folioki takes the word out of review and flags it as worth rewriting instead of letting it eat your sessions.
Treat that flag as a verdict on the card, not on you. A word forgotten eight times usually has something wrong with how it was captured: two meanings crammed into one card, an abstract translation with nothing to picture, an example that doesn't show the word doing anything. Rewrite it narrower, with a sentence that gives it a situation, and it will behave.
The daily habit
The queue is designed to end. Twenty new words a day by default — roughly what an hour of real reading throws up — and no cap at all on reviews, deliberately: a cap would stop a session in the middle of the words you had already half-learned and leave the schedule lying about what you know.
A few minutes daily beats an hour on Sunday, and not because of discipline. The intervals are computed from the day a word is due; answering everything in one weekly sitting drags every word off its own curve at once. Miss a day and nothing breaks — the queue is simply longer tomorrow.
When the deck says there is nothing to review, that is the correct state and not a bug. Anything left is a word you answered minutes ago, and asking again now would test your recognition rather than your memory. Go and read instead; that is where the next cards come from.
The settings that change the workload
- How well you want to remember — from 80% to 95%, at 90% by default. It is the chance of recall at which a word is brought back. Pushing it up buys a little retention for a great many more reviews; pulling it down trades some forgetting for a much shorter queue.
- New words per day — twenty by default. This is the real throttle on how busy next month is: every new word today is a review tomorrow, in three days, in two weeks. If the queue feels heavy, lower this before you touch anything else.
- Out of review after forgetting it N times — eight by default. Lower it if you would rather rewrite stubborn cards sooner.
If you are coming from Anki
Most of this will be familiar: the same four ratings in the same order, the same number keys, and FSRS doing the scheduling in both. The habits transfer exactly, and so does anything you already know about answering honestly.
What differs is where the cards come from. There is no deck to download and no cards to build: you read something you chose, tap a word you didn't know, and the card arrives written, with the sentence you met it in already on it. What Folioki does not have is Anki's depth of configuration, its add-ons, or — for now — export. If taking your cards elsewhere matters to you, say so; requests like that decide what gets built next.
Where to go next
If you want the reasoning under all of this — why the intervals widen, what FSRS models that older schedulers don't, and why words met in a book outlast words met on a list — that is the companion piece: spaced repetition, and the reading that feeds it.
Try it on a book you already own
Free to read and review with, on iPhone and iPad. Every word you save becomes a card that already carries the sentence you found it in.
