How a round works

The ring on the home screen

The ring shows you how far you have got today and fills up with every card you rate, until it is full when you reach your daily goal. It is a progress indicator and not an upper limit, because you can always keep learning.

The ring shows three days at once: the largest segment belongs to today, the two paler ones next to it stand for yesterday and the day before. That way you see at a glance whether you are keeping at it, without switching to the statistics for it.

Below it you find your streak and the start button with the due cards, and right at the bottom lie the four areas of the app. There is deliberately nothing more on this screen.

What people learn for

Qardbox does not know your material and does not want to know it either. It schedules dates for cards that you wrote or imported yourself. And what comes of it in the end is entirely up to you.

Legal definitions word for word

A definition fits exactly onto one card: the term on the front and on the back the wording that matters in the exam. You decide yourself what goes on the card, and can therefore also test a single element of an offence instead of the whole sentence.

In criminal law in particular that helps, because there the exact wording counts and not the approximate sense. And because in the end you only make two statements, you cannot let a half-remembered element pass as almost known.

Medicine, from anatomy to pharmacology

In medical studies the sheer quantity is the problem, not the single fact. That is exactly what a review scheduler is built for. It keeps old cards alive while you constantly add new ones, and you do not have to keep a list of any of it yourself.

You separate your fields through subjects and categories and can practise just one subject deliberately before an exam. And larger collections you bring in through a file instead of typing them out.

Vocabulary at school, in both directions

Vocabulary is the classic case for flashcards, and it is the case where direction counts. For every round you set whether the question side or the answer side comes first, or let Qardbox mix the two. That way you practise the same collection from German into English and back.

For a child you need neither a registration nor an address, because Qardbox runs without an account. And in the app itself there is nothing to buy that a child could unexpectedly run into while learning.

The streak, and what it is for

The streak counts the days in a row on which you learned, and so measures your sticking with it and not your quantity. That is deliberate, because regularity rarely happens by itself in everyday life.

From seven days on, Qardbox bridges a missed day for you, and you then have until the day after next to save it with five known cards. Only what you really knew counts towards it, and free practice does not count at all.

For a holiday or illness there is the weekly pause, during which your streak does not break for a whole week. You can use it again and again, but not back to back: between two pauses you have to have learned once. That way it stays a help for real interruptions and does not become a permanent state.

The break notice

When you have been rating for 25 minutes at a stretch, Qardbox shows a short notice. That is not a notification and not a push, just a sentence in the app. A longer interruption resets the counter. You can carry on learning all the same, the notice does not stop you.

How much and when

A little every day gets you further than a lot once a week, and ten to twenty minutes is quite enough for most people. The best time is the one that fits into your day, because a firm anchor beats any ideal hour.

And if a lot goes wrong for you, that is no bad sign. You are then remembering before you are certain, and that is precisely what consolidates your knowledge. A bit of effort is expressly wanted here.

How the scheduler calculates · All questions about learning