Method That Works (even if you spend just 3 minutes a day!)

There's no magic pill, of course, but there is a quite effective method for memorising information — flashcards with the spaced repetition system (SRS). Yes, it takes some time to create the cards themselves, but then you can review them literally anytime and anywhere — unlike rewatching, for example, a lecture recording, which takes much more time and serious concentration. And most importantly, with this method you will remember the information for a long time, and will not forget it immediately as soon as you leave the exam :)

Here researchers found out that people using SRS just for 3 minutes a day, in a long-term remember thrice as more as people who use other learning methods.

What is Spaced Repetition?

Back in 1885, psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, studying memory, derived the "forgetting curve": right after learning new information, most of it is forgotten, and what is not forgotten immediately is forgotten more slowly over time — the longer you remember, the less likely you are to forget, and with each repetition, forgetting occurs more slowly.

Based on this information, scientists experimented for many years to develop a system that would allow for better and longer-lasting memorisation — and in the 1970s, a method emerged that is still in use today: the Spaced Repetition System. The first implementation of this system looked like a series of boxes where cards with information fragments were sorted, depending on how well the person remembered their content. Cards from the first box are reviewed daily, and if the information was not forgotten, the card moved to the next box, the content of which is reviewed every two days, and so on. If information from any box was forgotten, the card moved back to the first box.

But physical cards have one serious problem: it's impossible to keep intervals for each card individually because the content of the box is reviewed in block, regardless of when a particular card entered it — so in the second box, which we will review tomorrow, there will be cards that entered yesterday and those that entered today from the first box. Alternatively, new boxes need to be created every day, and calculating when to review their content next sounds quite complicated.

For example, on the third day, we moved a card from the first box to the second, on the fourth day this same card appears again in the second box, and since we remember it well, it moves to the next box and appears again the next day... and then we don't see it for five days — naturally, during this time we forget what was on it, and return it to the first box. And everything starts over.

Solution to the problem

The main advantage of computer versions is the independence of cards from boxes. No longer do we need to calculate for each card when to review it next — the computer does it for us now.

Of course, over the decades, many implementations have appeared, including apps. But we tried them all, and none completely satisfied us — either they were too complex and required reviewing cards multiple times a day, or they repeated the same problem as paper cards with boxes mentioned above, or lacked pictures/sounds or didn't allow for learning more than one language/subject simultaneously — all the issues we discovered while searching for a ready-made app that we could use, we will discuss in the next post.

In the end, our search for a ready-made solution was unsuccessful, and we decided to create our own app that would be as simple and convenient as possible and solve our problem — thus Achiever Flashcards was born.