Study tool
Flashcards
Make a deck from your notes, then study it properly: you see the question first, try to answer it, and only then turn it over. Cards you get wrong come back sooner than cards you knew, so a session spends its time on the things you have not learned yet.
Decks are kept in this browser, and so are the notes you paste in. The cards are built on this device from your own sentences, so nothing is sent anywhere and there is nothing to save or train on.
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How this one works
A flashcard is a deliberately incomplete piece of information: a prompt on one side, and on the other the answer you are trying to hold in your head. That incompleteness is the method. Re-reading notes feels productive because it is easy and it confirms what you already believe. Answering a question you cannot see the answer to is uncomfortable, and it is the only reliable signal that you have learned something.
The answer is not on the page until you ask for it
This is the part most flashcard apps get wrong, and it is worth being specific about. If the back of the card is rendered into the page and hidden with CSS, it is still in the page: one keyboard shortcut away, visible to anything that reads the HTML, and one careless “select all” from a learner who is curious. The answer here is built only after you press Show the answer, so there is nothing to find by accident. The first version of this tool rendered both sides and hid one, which looked correct in a screenshot and defeated the entire purpose.
One card, one fact
A card that asks for three things teaches none of them, because recall of a bundle is recall of a shape rather than of content. “What are the three stages of mitosis?” and “What happens in prophase?” are not the same card: the first tends to be guessed correctly from the outline of a chapter, the second has to be retrieved. The same goes for a page of notes turned into one card, which is a summary wearing a flashcard’s clothes and tests almost nothing. When a batch of cards is generated for you, ones that turn out to test the same thing are dropped rather than shown twice.
What the review order actually does, and what it does not
When you say you did not know a card, it goes to the front of the next session. Cards you knew go to the back. New cards sit between the two, so a session alternates between catching up on what you have lost and meeting what you have not seen. That is a priority order, not a schedule. There is no interval here, no “review this on Thursday”, and no attempt to predict what you will forget next week. Proper spaced repetition measures how long you retain something and widens the gap each time you do. This tool does not do that, and pretending otherwise with a made-up interval would be worse than not having one.
Cards made from a model can be wrong
Cards written from material you pasted are checked against that material, and any card using wording or figures the material does not contain is thrown away rather than shown to you. That catches a lot but not everything: a model can produce a card that is entirely grounded in your text and still answer a question your text did not actually settle. If you give only a topic instead of material, there is nothing to check against and the cards come from the model’s own knowledge, which is worth exactly as much as you would expect. Read them before you rely on them, and edit any that are wrong. Every card is editable before you save it and at any point afterwards.
One card for a thing, not one card for a chapter
The fastest way to make a deck that works is to work from questions rather than from notes. Read a section, close it, and write down what you would want to be asked. The cards you get wrong are the ones worth keeping. Where a deck is large enough that you would rather not revise all of it, the order above means you do not have to.
Making cards you will actually come back to
A flashcard works when it asks for one thing. A card that asks for a definition, an example, and a date at once is hard to answer and hard to score, so split it into three cards. The effort of deciding what a card is asking is most of the work of making a good deck.
Write the question so that the answer cannot be guessed from its shape. A card whose question contains most of the answer tests recognition rather than recall, and recognition feels like learning while producing very little of it.
Keep your own wording. A card copied verbatim from a textbook can be answered by remembering where it sat on the page rather than what it said, and that memory does not transfer to an exam question asked differently.
Review the deck before you rely on it. A typo in the answer is memorised as faithfully as a correct one, so a quick read through on the day you make the cards is worth more than an extra review later, when the error has already been rehearsed several times.
More on this in the guides
Most useful when you are revising for something regulated. Licences and board exams covers why the volume of material is what it is, and choosing a course of study covers picking one in the first place. See the Student Guide index for the rest.
Further reading: Read the full guide: Flashcards
Common questions
Where are my decks kept?
In this browser, and nowhere else. A deck is never uploaded, it does not follow you to another device, and clearing this site's data deletes it. That is the trade for not making you sign in: your material stays on your machine.
What happens to the material I paste in?
It goes to the card maker, which runs on this site's own server, and that is the only thing that leaves your device. It is read, turned into cards and then discarded: not saved, not logged, and not used to train anything. The finished deck comes back to your browser and stays there.
Are the cards accurate?
Usually right, sometimes wrong. Each card is checked against your material before you see it, and any card using wording or figures the material does not contain is thrown away rather than shown to you. But if you give only a topic instead of material, the cards come from the model's own knowledge, which is about as reliable as you would expect from a model. Read them before you rely on them. You can edit a card before saving it and at any time afterwards.
Why did it make fewer cards than I asked for?
Because it dropped the ones that failed the checks instead of handing them over. A card whose answer was copied straight out of your notes, or that already contained its own answer, or that repeated a card you already had, is not worth revising from. Fewer cards you can trust beats more you have to check.
Does it tell me when to come back?
No, and it does not pretend to. Cards you miss go to the front of the next session and cards you knew go to the back, which is enough to stop you re-reading what you have already learned. Real spaced repetition, with intervals measured in days, is not built yet.
How long does it take to make cards?
Around half a minute for six cards from a page of notes. The model runs on this site's server and writes several cards and checks them in one go. The page waits and says what it is doing rather than showing a spinner with nothing behind it.