Twenty is a small number chosen for one reason: a review session has to be finishable. The moment a queue cannot be cleared it stops being a task and becomes a debt, and children abandon debts.
At a glance
| Our answer | |
|---|---|
| Cards per day | 20, fixed |
| Typical time | 5–7 minutes |
| What happens to the rest | They wait; most overdue served first |
| Can a child raise it? | No |
| Can a child do extra? | Not by design — the queue is the queue |
| What if they miss days? | The backlog is drained 20 a day, oldest first |
The failure mode this prevents
Anyone who has used Anki for a few months has seen it. You miss a week — illness, a holiday, exams — and come back to 340 cards due. The number is not just large, it is accusatory. Almost nobody clears it. Most people either grind through in a joyless hour, or quietly stop opening the app.
For an adult that is an annoyance. For a twelve-year-old it is the end of the habit, and it takes a chunk of their confidence with it, because the pile reads as evidence about them rather than about scheduling.
So the queue never shows more than twenty cards. Miss a fortnight and there is still no wall — there are twenty cards today, and twenty tomorrow, oldest-due first, until the backlog is gone.
Why twenty in particular
Twenty cards at roughly twenty seconds each is about six or seven minutes. That length matters:
- It fits in the gaps of a real evening — after dinner, before a shower, in the car.
- It is short enough that starting is not a decision. The hardest part of any daily habit is the transition into it, and a task advertised as "about six minutes" barely triggers one.
- It is long enough to be worth doing. Five cards would not move a collection along.
We also show the honest estimate before your child starts, rather than just the count. "12 cards, about 4 minutes" is a promise a child can evaluate. "12 cards due" is a demand.
Nothing is skipped
The cap changes when a card is seen, never whether. The queue is always built by taking the most overdue cards first, so the effect of a busy week is that everything slides later by a few days — which, for a system built on approximate gaps, is well within tolerance. Spaced repetition is not brittle; a card reviewed on day 17 instead of day 15 is fine.
Why we don't offer "study more"
Most flashcard apps let you push past the day's queue. We don't, and this is a genuine difference of opinion rather than a missing feature.
Cramming extra reviews into one evening is the exact behaviour spaced repetition exists to replace. A child who reviews the same card four times tonight has done something that feels like a lot of work and produces very little durable memory — the effect is well documented, and it is why we would rather the interface simply did not offer it.
There is also a subtler reason. If extra study is available, "did you do your cards?" becomes "did you do enough cards?", and an open-ended target is exactly the kind of pressure a wellbeing-first product should not manufacture. Twenty cards, done, is a complete answer.
What to do if your child wants to do more
Have them do something better than more flashcards. Cards are for retrieval of single facts; they are not where understanding is built. If a child is keen and has finished their queue, the useful next step is a session with the tutor on something they found tricky — which will also produce new cards, in the right way, from the conversation.
What the cap doesn't fix
Being honest about the limits: the cap prevents overwhelm, but it does not prevent a child from steadily accumulating more cards than they want to maintain. That problem needs a different tool — an ending for cards — which is why a card can be locked in once it is genuinely known, or put away if it is no longer useful.
The cap protects any single day. Giving cards an ending is what protects the year.
FAQ
What happens to the cards over the 20-card limit?
They wait. The queue always serves the most overdue cards first, so nothing is skipped — it simply arrives on a later day.
Can the cap be raised?
No, deliberately. It is the one number protecting the daily habit, and a child asked to choose their own limit will either pick the largest available or ignore the question.
How long does 20 cards take?
Usually five to seven minutes. The estimate shown before a session assumes about twenty seconds a card, which is close for a settled collection.