Key concepts
Gain a basic understanding of Recall's key concepts to get started quickly.
Card
A card represents a piece of information you want to remember in Recall. A card has a front side (the information shown immediately) and a back side (the information you need to remember).
Deck
A deck is a collection of cards. Several important settings are defined at the deck level:
- The data structure of cards (deck fields).
- The design of cards (card layouts).
- Study settings such as the number of new cards to study per day or the desired retention.
Deck field
A deck field is a property that you can fill in for each card. For example, a simple deck might have a "Question" and an "Answer" field. A language learning deck might have a "Word" field, a "Translation" field, and an "Audio" field.
Card layout
Card layouts define how fields are displayed in a card. A deck can have one or multiple card layouts. Having several card layouts allows you to retrieve knowledge from different pieces of information. For example, you can have a front and back side in one layout, and reverse them in another.
Card variant
A card variant is a card displayed in a given layout. Each card variant has its own study schedule.
Deck template
A deck template contains deck fields settings and card layouts, without the cards themselves.
Review
A review is the action of going through a card to remember it. After revealing the content, you rate how well you remembered it.
Study session
A study session is a series of card reviews that you do in one go.
Retention
In Recall, the retention of a card is the estimated probability that you will remember it at a given time. The retention of a deck is the average of all cards' retention.
Scheduled, unscheduled and suspended cards
Scheduled cards have a review date from which they will be "due" for review.
Unscheduled cards don't have a review date yet. They can become scheduled manually, or automatically when new cards are added to reviews.
Suspended cards are not shown in reviews and can't be scheduled automatically until you unsuspend them.