Study vs Review

Flipnem has two distinct ways to work through a deck. They look similar on the surface but operate very differently under the hood.

Study (Study Session)

Study is the main learning mode. It uses FSRS to schedule every card for you.

When you press Study from the deck info page, the scheduler builds a queue for today:

• New cards — cards you have never seen before (limited per session to avoid overwhelming you)
• Due cards — cards whose scheduled review date is today or overdue

After you reveal each card and rate it, FSRS immediately updates that card's stability, difficulty, and next due date. When the queue is empty you are done for the day — the right cards have been reviewed at the right time.

The daily queue resets at midnight in your local time zone. Cards that become due after midnight will appear the next time you open a study session.

Use Study when: you want to build lasting memory. This is the default mode and the one you should use for most learning.

What the rating buttons do

After revealing the answer you choose one of four ratings. Each rating maps to a different interval multiplier:

• Again — card re-enters the queue in a few minutes; stability resets
• Hard — next interval is shorter than normal; stability grows slowly
• Good — next interval is calibrated to your current stability
• Easy — next interval is longer than Good; a bonus for instant recall

The scheduler uses your full rating history to tune these intervals over time.

Graduating cards

New cards start in a "learning" phase with short intervals (minutes to hours). Once you rate a card Good or Easy enough times it "graduates" to the review phase, where intervals extend to days and eventually months.

Review (Review Session)

Review is a scheduler-free mode. Every card in the deck is shown once, in whatever order you choose, with no due dates involved.

To launch a Review session, open a deck's info page and tap the Review All button (or use the ⋯ menu on the Decks page). You can choose from three orderings:

• Natural Order — the original sequence the cards were created or imported in
• Shuffled — random order, reshuffled each session
• Hardest First — cards with the lowest historical success rate appear first

By default, ratings you give during a Review session do not affect the FSRS schedule. If you want your answers to count toward the scheduler, toggle Update schedule on before starting the session.

Use Review when: you want to cover the full deck in one pass, such as before an exam, or when you want to browse cards in a specific order regardless of what's due.

Side-by-Side Comparison

When to use each

Use Study as your default — the scheduler surfaces only what you need to review each day, keeping sessions short and effective over time.

Use Review when you want to cover the entire deck regardless of due dates: cramming before an exam, a first pass through new material, or reviewing cards in a specific order.

Card Scheduling Details

The Card Scheduling table (found on the deck inspect page under Card Scheduling) shows each card's current FSRS state. Here is what each column means.

Interval

The number of days until the card is due again. This is not set by a single button press — FSRS calculates it from a combination of:

• The rating you gave (Again / Hard / Good / Easy)
• The card's accumulated stability (how solidly the card is stored in memory based on your full history with it)
• The card's difficulty (how hard the algorithm has determined this card is for you personally)

The same "Good" answer on a card you've reviewed 10 times produces a much longer interval than on a card you've seen twice, because stability has grown. Rating buttons shift the outcome — Easy pushes the interval up, Hard pulls it down — but the base interval comes from your history, not the last press alone.

Reps

The total number of times the card has been reviewed over its lifetime, including early learning-phase repetitions. A card with Reps = 10 has been through the queue ten times.

Lapses

The number of times you answered Again on a card that was already in the review phase (i.e., you had previously learned it and then forgot it). Answering Again during the initial learning steps does not count as a lapse — only forgetting a graduated card does.

A card with many lapses is one you have repeatedly forgotten after graduating. The algorithm treats high-lapse cards as harder and tends to give them more conservative (shorter) intervals going forward.