Instead of repeating the same material many times in one sitting, spaced practice spreads those encounters over time. Combining spacing with retrieval gives you repeated chances to bring an idea back to mind.
How Rote makes a schedule
After revealing a card, you choose Again, Hard, Good, or Easy. Rote uses a simple, transparent schedule rather than claiming to predict your personal forgetting curve.
- Again: retry later in the current session, with the next due time set to 10 minutes. The successful-review count resets.
- Hard: the next interval is 1.2 times the previous interval, rounded to a whole day, with a one-day minimum.
- Good: a first successful review gives one day. A subsequent interval of one day or less becomes three days. Longer intervals are multiplied by 2.2 and rounded.
- Easy: the interval is multiplied by 3.5 and rounded, with a four-day minimum.
Intervals are capped at 180 days. These are product rules, not a clinically validated retention forecast. Your honest rating is more useful than trying to earn a particular result.
Due review versus extra practice
A normal review uses cards whose due time has arrived and updates their schedules. Practice mode lets you revisit a deck at any time; it records practice in your activity history but leaves the due dates alone.
Make it a sustainable habit
Start with a small deck. Returning regularly to ten useful cards is a better first step than importing a thousand and never opening them. If a card keeps failing, simplify it or revisit the underlying explanation.
Further reading: The science of effective learning with spacing and retrieval practice, Nature Reviews Psychology.