Key concepts

Gain a basic understanding of Recall's key concepts to get started quickly.


Card

A card represents a basic piece of information you want to remember in Recall.

Deck

A deck is a collection of cards. Most important settings are defined at the deck level:

  • The data structure of cards (card fields).
  • The design of cards (card layouts).
  • Study settings such as the number of new cards to study per day or the desired retention.

Card field

A card 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 "Example sentence" field.

Learn more about card fields

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.

Learn more about card layouts

Deck template

A deck template contains card 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 cards 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 and unscheduled cards

Cards can either be scheduled or unscheduled.

Scheduled cards have a review date from which they will be "due" for review.

Unscheduled card don't have a review date yet. They can become scheduled manually, or automatically when new cards are added to reviews.

Learn more about scheduling