Concept
Spaced Repetition
Spaced repetition means reviewing with growing gaps: first soon, then less often, and the knowledge still sticks.
- 1
Discover
In “For you” you see content from the community that matches your interests, like a story about a book. Whatever grabs you, you borrow.
Discover
In “For you” you see content from the community that matches your interests, like a story about a book. Whatever grabs you, you borrow.
- 2
Rate
In “Yours” the story comes back. You see it again and say honestly how well it sticks.
Rate
In “Yours” the story comes back. You see it again and say honestly how well it sticks.
- 3
Remember
From your answer, Mnemorya works out when you’ll start to forget it and brings it back just before. The curve stays high, all the way to the butterfly.
Remember
From your answer, Mnemorya works out when you’ll start to forget it and brings it back just before. The curve stays high, all the way to the butterfly.
Spaced repetition means reviewing with gaps in between. Think of a plant: at first you water it often, later now and then is enough. Knowledge works the same way. First you review after a short time, then after days, then after weeks.
As a student, the Pole Piotr Woźniak wanted to learn English vocabulary without cramming everything again all the time. From 1985 on he tested on himself which gaps worked best, and in 1987 he turned that into the program SuperMemo. In 2022 Jarrett Ye took these ideas further and introduced FSRS, a free method for calculating review schedules that anyone can use.
Every time you remember again after a break, the knowledge lasts longer. Reviewing too early does little, because you still know it anyway. Reviewing too late is a struggle, because it is already gone. The right moment lies in between.
In Mnemorya, FSRS plans every review for you. With every success the gaps get longer. Your cards grow in stages along the way: as an egg a card lasts under 1 day, as a caterpillar under 21 days, as a cocoon under 180 days and as a butterfly from 180 days on.
The research behind it
The studies this method rests on. Each one is verifiable through its DOI — looking them up is very much the point.
A big overview of hundreds of experiments shows: people who spread out their reviews remember much more than people who learn everything in one go.
Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.
doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354Jarrett Ye and colleagues show how a calculation method based on real study data can work out the best moment for every review.
A Stochastic Shortest Path Algorithm for Optimizing Spaced Repetition Scheduling. Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 4381–4390.
doi.org/10.1145/3534678.3539081
Keep watching
See the idea in motion.
Selected videos for going deeper. Each link opens the original creator on YouTube.
