Flashcards
Anyone can show you a card. The question is when.
A flashcard app that shows you everything every day is a stack of paper with a battery. What makes cards work is spacing them — and what makes you keep going is answering one in under a second. Here is one card, and where each answer sends it.
Didn’t know
in about a minute
It stays in this session, a few cards later.
Knew it
tomorrow
It leaves the session, and the gap grows from there.
Know it a second time and it comes back in 3 days.
Every interval here is computed by the app’s own scheduler.
Three things that decide it
Everything else is a preference
The schedule
Whether the app knows the difference between a word you find trivial and one you keep missing. FSRS does; a fixed ladder does not.
Time per card
Half a second of hesitation, multiplied by two hundred cards a day, is the difference between a habit and an abandoned deck. Two answers, not four.
Where you can do it
The sessions people finish happen on a phone, offline, in the gaps. An app that only works at a desk gets used at a desk.
Why most flashcard apps stop being used
Not because the cards were bad, and not because the person lacked discipline. Because the pile grew. An app without real spacing shows you everything you have ever made, so the session gets longer every week — and a session with no end is one you eventually stop starting.
Proper spacing inverts that. Cards you know well move months out and stop appearing; the daily number stops tracking the size of your collection and starts tracking how much you are adding. A deck of two thousand words can be a five-minute session, and that is the whole reason the scheduling matters more than any feature.
What a good card looks like
- One thing per card. Three translations on the back means three different recalls sharing one answer, and you will never be sure which one you got.
- Short front. A whole sentence on the front tests reading, not recall.
- An example if it is ambiguous. A word with two meanings needs the context that fixes which one you meant.
- Editable in place. You will only notice a bad card mid-review, so fixing it has to take two seconds.
Focus is what makes it fast
Rayaad is a flashcard app for vocabulary: one card shape, no note types, no images, no cloze deletions, no add-ons. That constraint is what pays for everything else — the scheduler arrives tuned, the review screen has two buttons, pronunciation knows which language each side is in, and there is nothing to set up before your first card. A tool that has to handle every kind of material cannot make any of those decisions for you.
Next: what changes when the cards are in another language, or how to get an existing list in.
Flashcard questions
What makes one flashcard app better than another?
Almost entirely the scheduling and the speed of a single card. Making cards is a solved problem everywhere; deciding when to show them, and getting you through two hundred of them without friction, is not.
Can I import my existing flashcards?
If they are in a CSV or a list you can paste, yes — every row is shown in a preview table before anything is written. Rayaad cannot import another app’s review history, which is a real cost of switching and worth weighing.
Does Rayaad support images or cloze deletions?
A card is a word, its meaning and an optional example. That single shape is what lets Rayaad arrive already configured — there are no note types to design before your first review, and nothing to maintain afterwards.
Is there a free flashcard app that does spaced repetition properly?
Several, including this one. Rayaad’s free plan includes FSRS scheduling with no daily review cap, full sync, offline review, every surface, listen mode and export — the ceilings are on how much you can hold, not on how the reviewing works.
Twenty words tonight.
Free plan with no review limit, on every device. No ads, and your words stay yours.