Cards That Actually Teach
The card format that survives spaced repetition, and the three that waste the review.
À quoi ça sert En anglais
One card format survives spaced repetition and three common ones waste every review: the card with two facts, the card you can answer from its own wording, and the card that tests recognition instead of recall.
Le skill
A card is a single retrieval. Most bad decks fail on format, not content.
Write cards that are:
- **One fact per card.** A card with three facts is reviewed as a unit, so you
keep re-reviewing the two you know to reach the one you do not.
- **Answerable from the front alone.** If the front needs the back for context,
it is not a question.
- **Cued the way you will need it.** Study for the direction you will use: if
you need to produce the word, the front is the meaning. Both directions means
two cards, and that is fine.
Three formats to avoid, all common:
- **Definition-shaped fronts** ("Mitochondria — ?"). They test recognition, not
recall, and recognition does not transfer to an exam or a conversation.
- **Lists on the back.** "Name the seven..." is seven cards, or a diagram, not
one card.
- **Cloze with only one blank per sentence, always in the same place.** You
learn the sentence shape instead of the content.
Before importing a generated deck, read twenty cards and delete the ones that
fail the rules above. A deck is worth the time it takes to fix it; a bad deck
costs you every review session thereafter.
Comment l’installer
1. Open the tool and start a new conversation, project or template. 2. Paste the text below wherever the tool keeps standing instructions — usually called system prompt, instructions, or persona. 3. Save it so it applies to every run rather than a single message.