About this AI label
The background image of this website was generated with the help of artificial intelligence.
Study at the right moment.
You should not study longer, but at the point where it pays off.
Free for iPhone.
Everything stays on your device.
Time spent studying is not the same as learning
Working through the evening before an exam feels like diligence. Two weeks later most of it is gone again. What sticks is decided not by the amount but by the spacing between repetitions. That spacing is exactly what Qardbox plans for you, card by card.
All in one sitting
If you read the same card five times in a row, you know it on the fifth pass, but only because it is still fresh in your short-term memory. You never had to retrieve it, and by the next morning little of that feeling is left.
Spread across several days
You see the same card again only shortly before it slips away from you. Retrieving it then takes noticeable effort. And it is precisely in that moment that your knowledge settles a little further for the next time.
The principles behind this are called the spacing effect, the testing effect and desirable difficulties. They have been studied for over a hundred years, and Qardbox invents nothing new about them. It only makes sure they work in your daily routine without any planning on your part. Where this comes from.
Numbers instead of gut feeling. For every card separately.
Qardbox estimates for each of your cards how long you will still have it in your head, and places the next repetition shortly before that point.
Behind it is FSRS-6, an openly published method into which every single rating you give feeds. Your plan therefore keeps shifting and always reflects your latest session. Cards you have down come back in weeks, and cards you struggle with come back tomorrow.
Once you bring enough history, Qardbox recomputes the weights on your device and adopts your own only if they end up fitting you better than the tested defaults. The first of these milestones is at 512 ratings on separate days, and the following ones double from there. How it calculates.
Retention
91%
above your average
Streak
23 days
running
Two swipes, and that is the whole of the controls
You read the front and swipe right if you knew it, left if you did not. You may turn the card over, but you do not have to.
Other programs give you four or five levels, and at first that sounds more precise. But the middle levels are pure self-assessment, and that swings with how your day is going. Two clear answers therefore beat five approximate gradations every time. For the calculation behind it, all that counts is whether you could retrieve the card.
QUESTION
to postpone
You can see where you stand at any time
Each of your cards carries a status, and you never recognise it by colour alone but always by the word beside it too.
Your cards are new, in learning, in review or mastered. Mastered does not mean you will never see a card again. It means you have known it several times in a row and its next appointment is therefore a whole month away.
What you get for that are numbers and not motivational slogans, and there is no metric here that has to go up, because nobody earns from it. What you see is your own collection and nothing else.
- New
- 84
- In learning
- 132
- Review
- 310
- Mastered
- 246
- Karten insgesamt
- 772
And all of it without a penny
You get the full scope from day one, with no in-app purchases, no subscription and no trial period.
There is no business model behind Qardbox that would need financing. It is a personal project: I wanted a decent flashcard app and could not find one without an account, a subscription and data collection. So in the end I built myself one.
That works out in your favour, because nobody has an interest in keeping you in the app for as long as possible. Which is also why you get no reminder when nothing is due for you. Why this works.
For every subject you have to know
Qardbox does not know your subject and therefore plans for any of them: for legal definitions, for anatomy and pharmacology, for vocabulary at school and for the thirty sentences you have to know at work.
And for everything that must not leave your house, because on this route it never goes out in the first place.
87 questions, 87 answers
All your questions are answered here without marketing language. They range from “How do I rate a card?” through “Why are 20 cards due when my daily goal is 40?” to “What data do you collect about me?”.