How Machi.study works

Machi.study is a flashcard app. You write cards, you study them, and Machi.study decides when to show each one again. That last part is the whole thing. Everything else on this page is detail.

Forgetting is normal, and it has a shape

Learn something today and you’ll lose most of it within a week. That isn’t a personal failing and it isn’t a sign you studied badly. It’s how memory works for everybody, and psychologists have been measuring it since the 1880s.

The useful part is that forgetting is predictable. It’s fast at first and then it slows down. So there’s a moment for every fact where you still just about have it — and if you pull it back at that moment, it sticks for much longer than it did the first time. Do that a few times and the fact stops fading at all.

That’s spaced repetition. Not studying more. Studying at the right moments.

What Machi.study does with that

Every card in Machi.study carries its own schedule. Not the set — the card. So the three terms you keep mixing up come back tomorrow, and the twelve you already know sit quietly for a month.

When a card comes up in Review, you answer it and then say one of two things:

• Got it. You knew it. Machi.study waits longer before showing it again.
• Not yet. You didn’t. It comes back in about a minute, in the same session, and the gap starts building again from there.

Most apps give you four buttons here. Machi.study gives you two, because “was that hard or was it very hard” is a question nobody answers honestly at eleven at night, and a wrong answer to it makes the schedule worse, not better.

A card you keep getting right walks up a ladder that looks roughly like this: ten minutes, a day, four days, two weeks, two months. The exact numbers move — Machi.study adjusts them to how you personally do on that card — but the shape is always the same. Each gap is longer than the last.

“Not yet” costs you nothing

Pressing Not yet doesn’t undo anything. There’s no streak to break, no score to lose, and nothing gets taken off you. It’s just information: you told Machi.study you need that card sooner, so it comes sooner. Being honest with it is the single biggest thing you can do to make the schedule work.

A card you got wrong and then relearned is marked in gold. That’s not a black mark. Those are usually the ones you end up knowing best, because you saw them more often.

The five ways to study

The same set can be studied five different ways. They’re all unlocked for everybody. Nothing here is a paid tier.

• Flashcards. Flip through the cards. Nothing is graded and nothing is counted. Use this the first time you meet a set, when you just want to see what’s in it.
• Review. The one that drives the schedule. This is where “Got it” and “Not yet” live, and it’s the mode to use if you only ever use one.
• Learn. First you pick the answer from a few options, then later you type it from memory. Harder than flipping cards, and that’s exactly why it works better.
• Match. Clear a board of pairs against the clock. Good for the first pass through a new set and good for when you can’t face anything serious.
• Practice test. A graded test, like the real one, with all your answers back at the end. Use it a few days before the real thing, not the night before.

Why recalling beats re-reading

There’s a second idea underneath all five modes, and it’s worth knowing because it changes how you use every study app, not just this one.

Reading your notes again feels productive. It’s smooth, it’s familiar, and you finish feeling like you know the material. That feeling is the problem: it’s measuring how familiar the page looks, not whether you could produce the answer with the page shut.

Trying to remember something — and struggling a bit — feels worse and works better. The effort is the part that does the work. That’s why Learn makes you type the answer instead of pointing at it, and why a practice test is worth more than an hour of highlighting.

What this doesn’t do

Being straight with you: spaced repetition is very good at facts. Words and their meanings, dates, formulas, parts of a diagram, the bones in a hand. It is not a way to understand something you haven’t understood yet.

If a topic doesn’t make sense, cards won’t fix that, and drilling cards you don’t understand is the most common way people waste time with an app like this. Understand it first, from a teacher or a textbook or a friend. Then make cards so you don’t lose it again.

Studying without an account

If somebody sends you a link to their set, you can open it and study it right away. No account, no form, nothing to fill in. It stays in your browser.

An account is for keeping your own sets, and for having them on your phone as well as your laptop. You need to be 13 or over to have one — the privacy policy explains why.

What it costs

Nothing. We don’t charge students, and every study mode is unlocked for everybody. Machi.study is paid for with advertising: still banners at the edge of the page. They don’t cover your work, there’s nothing you have to close before you can answer, and there’s none on a screen with a question on it.

The study guides go further into how to actually use this — how to write cards worth studying, and how to plan the weeks before a test.