Flashcards — spaced review of a course

A few cards at a time, spaced out so each comes back just as you're about to lose it. How sure you are, then the answer.

A quiz asks whether you followed a video today. Flashcards ask whether you still know it weeks later — a few cards at a time, spaced out so each one comes back just as you're about to lose it. Run them on one video from its row, or on a whole course from ☰ → Study in the panel header.

The order is the feature

Every card runs the same three steps, and they never happen in a different order:

1. The question, on its own. Try to answer it in your head. Nothing on screen will show you the answer at this point — there's no button for it.

2. How sure are you? Four buttons: no idea, not sure, probably, certain. This is the step people are tempted to skip, and it's the one that makes the report at the end mean anything.

3. Now the answer, with the line of the video it came from and a timestamp straight to that moment. Then you say how it actually went — Again, Hard, Good, Easy — and that's what schedules it.

When cards come back

A card you say Good to comes back in a day, then six days, then at increasing gaps that stretch every time you get it right and tighten when you don't. Say Again and it's back tomorrow, and it stays a little harder from then on.

• Due cards always come before new ones. A session shows you what's owed first; new cards fill whatever room is left. Otherwise a schedule quietly turns into a queue of whatever was generated most recently.

• Nothing due is a real answer. If everything is scheduled for later, the panel says so and offers you nothing — reviewing a card you already know today is the one thing spaced repetition exists to stop you doing.

• Leaving halfway is safe. Every card you've graded is already scheduled, which is why the button says Finish here rather than Cancel.

Where the cards come from

Each card quotes a real line of the video, and we find that line in the captions ourselves before the card is ever shown to you; the timestamp under the answer is where the quote actually occurs.

The course run builds from videos you've ticked as watched — a card about something you haven't seen yet isn't recall, it's a guess, and over a forty-video course that filter is also what keeps one press affordable. The per-video run doesn't ask: pressing the button on a video says more clearly than a checkbox does that you want cards for it.

A quote we can't find in the captions costs the whole card. That's stricter than mind maps, where an unfindable quote only costs a branch its timestamp — but a card's entire claim is “the video said this”, so with the quote unverified there's nothing left of it worth asking.

The report

At the end of a session, all of it worked out on your own machine, offline, free, every time:

• What you recalled — and the same number

  weighted

  , so remembering something after three weeks counts for more than remembering it since yesterday.

• How well you know what you know. Being certain and right is worth as much as being unsure and wrong is cheap; the sentence tells you which way you lean.

• Sure and wrong — the list actually worth acting on. Something you know you don't know, you look up. Something you're confident about and have wrong just stays wrong.

• Right but unsure — you know more than you think on those.

• Concepts worth another look, each one a button straight to the moment in the video where it's explained.

What it costs

Taking them with you

Export to Anki writes a CSV you can drag straight into Anki — question, answer, the quoted line, and the concept as a tag. It's every card in the course, not just the session, and it's free.

Questions