Flashcard maker
Build a deck by typing cards or pasting a list, then study with flip cards, shuffle and progress tracking. Everything stays in your browser.
No cards yet. Add one above, or import a list to get started.
About flashcards
A flashcard is the smallest possible study tool: a prompt on one side, the answer on the other, and nothing else to hide behind. Its power comes from what happens in the gap between the two. Reading a page of notes feels productive but mostly rehearses recognition — you see the material and it looks familiar. A flashcard forces retrieval instead: you have to produce the answer from memory before you turn the card over, and that act of pulling information out is what strengthens the memory, a phenomenon psychologists call the testing effect. The flip also gives you honest feedback within a second, so you find out immediately whether you actually knew something or only felt like you did. This maker keeps that simplicity intact while removing the paper: cards live in your browser, the deck reshuffles on demand, and the tool remembers which cards you have already conquered so your attention goes to the ones you have not.
History of flashcards
Flashcards are older than most of the technology used to study them. The first set widely credited as flashcards appeared in 1834, when the English author Favell Lee Mortimer published Reading Disentangled, a boxed collection of phonics cards designed to teach children to read one sound at a time. The scientific case for the method arrived later: in 1885 the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus published his experiments on memory, mapping the forgetting curve that shows how quickly newly learned material decays and demonstrating that repetitions spread over time hold far better than the same effort crammed into one sitting. In 1972 the German science journalist Sebastian Leitner turned that finding into a practical system in his book So lernt man lernen, describing a set of numbered boxes in which a card you answer correctly moves to a box reviewed less often while a card you miss falls back to the first box. Computers picked the idea up in the 1980s with Piotr Woźniak's SuperMemo, the first program to schedule reviews algorithmically, and the open-source Anki, released in 2006, carried spaced repetition to a mass audience of language learners and medical students.
How spaced repetition strengthens recall
Spaced repetition is the deliberate use of Ebbinghaus's finding: review a fact just as you are about to forget it and the memory is reinforced far more than by reviewing it while it is still fresh. Each successful recall at a longer interval flattens the forgetting curve a little more, so the gaps between reviews can grow from a day to a week to a month. The Leitner box is the manual version of this idea, and marking a card as known here works the same way — it lifts the card out of the current rotation so the deck in front of you keeps narrowing to the material that is genuinely unresolved. The mechanism that makes it work is effortful retrieval: an answer that comes back slowly and with difficulty does more for long-term memory than one that arrives instantly, which is why it is worth pausing on a hard card before flipping it rather than turning it over the moment you feel stuck.
What flashcards are used for
Language learners are the classic case, drilling vocabulary, gendered articles, irregular verbs and character readings where there is no rule to derive the answer from and the only route is memory. Medical and law students use them for the enormous volume of discrete facts their exams demand — drug dosages, anatomical structures, case names and statutes — and often build decks collaboratively across a cohort. Beyond formal study, flashcards suit anything that is a lookup rather than a judgement: keyboard shortcuts, command-line flags, chemical symbols, historical dates, musical key signatures, capital cities, the names of colleagues before a conference. They suit memorising a speech or lines in a script, too. Where flashcards are a poor fit is material whose value lies in connection rather than recall — an argument you need to be able to construct, or a process you need to be able to carry out — which is better served by working through problems than by flipping cards.
Frequently asked questions
Are my flashcards saved if I close the tab?
Yes. Your deck is written to your browser's local storage every time you change it, so closing the tab or shutting the computer down will not lose your cards — reopening the page brings the same deck back, along with which cards you had already marked as known. Because the storage lives in the browser rather than on a server, the deck is tied to that one browser on that one device: it will not appear in a different browser, in a private window, or on your phone, and clearing your browsing data will erase it. If a deck matters to you, use the Export CSV button to keep a copy you can re-import later or open in a spreadsheet.
Can I import a word list I already have?
Yes, and it is usually the fastest way to build a deck. Open the Import a list panel and paste one card per line, with the front and back separated by a tab, a comma, a hyphen, a colon or a pipe. Leave the separator on Auto-detect and the importer works out which one you used, line by line. Copying two columns straight out of Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers pastes as tab-separated text, so a vocabulary list or a glossary you already keep in a spreadsheet becomes a deck in one step. You can add the imported lines to the deck you already have or replace it entirely.
What do the Got it and Review again buttons do?
They sort the deck into cards you have learned and cards you still need. Got it marks the current card as known and moves on; Review again clears that mark so the card stays in the queue. The counter at the top shows how many cards are still outstanding, and ticking Only unfinished cards drops everything you have marked as known out of the rotation so you spend your time on the material that is not sticking yet. Marks are saved with the deck, so you can stop mid-session and pick up where you left off, and the Reset progress button clears every mark when you want a fresh pass through the whole deck.
How many flashcards should I study in one session?
Short, frequent sessions beat long ones. Most people do well with twenty to thirty cards in a sitting of ten to twenty minutes, repeated daily, rather than a single marathon review the night before a test — the spacing between sessions is what moves material into long-term memory. If a deck is large, split it into smaller decks by topic and rotate through them across the week. When a particular card keeps failing, it is usually a sign the card is trying to hold too much at once and should be broken into two or three simpler cards.
Can I print the flashcards to cut out?
Yes. The Print button lays the deck out as a grid of cards with the front on the top half and the back on the bottom half, divided by a dashed fold line. Print the page, cut along the outer borders and fold each card in half and you have a physical set with the prompt on one side and the answer on the other. The rest of the page — header, navigation and the article below the tool — is hidden from the printout, so you only use paper on the cards themselves. Choosing Save as PDF instead of a printer in the print dialog gives you a shareable copy of the deck.
What makes a good flashcard?
The strongest cards ask for exactly one piece of information. A card whose back holds a paragraph is really several cards stacked together, and you will never be sure which part you actually recalled; splitting it lets you see precisely what you know. Write the front as a specific question or cue rather than a bare topic, avoid wording that lets you guess the answer from the shape of the prompt, and give the answer in your own words so you are recalling meaning rather than matching a memorised sentence. Adding a short piece of context — an example sentence, a formula, a date — helps the memory attach to something, as long as the card still tests a single fact.