Show HN: I built FlipCards – a flashcard app with variations to improve learning

You have to associate variations as a single "owner card" otherwise you're adding in unnecessary reviews. You want to review 100 cards (which display a random variation on demand) not 500 cards. That's why you need to use a bit of Anki JS to randomize the "multiple fronts" on a single card to achieve the same results.

Source: This is what I do on my Anki decks

To add another bit of feedback - it seems like a lot of people in the comments don't understand the value of variations so OP you'll want to show an actual case study example immediately.

Here is one to demonstrate:

  Variation 1:
  This famous escape-artist was born in 1874 and died in 1926.

  Variation 2:
  What famous magician born in 1874 passed away of peritonitis 52 years later?

  Answer: Harry Houdini   

Variations ARE the SAME CARD. They're just a means of "rephrasing" the question to break your brain from its ruthless pattern matching ability.

Answering any variation causes the next review time for THIS CONSOLIDATED CARD to get pushed back.

I achieve a similar variation system in my own flashcards but use javascript + Anki to accomplish it.

Is this web only? Are there apps? Hard to sign up for something when I have no idea what I'm buying.

Multiple variations "per-card" are the way to go. It was one of my big gripes about Anki too! My other big complaint is that it only really is tracking one metric when it comes to study - whether you remember the "card" or not.

This is where Anki falls short for language study, because we as language learners also want to look at listening & reading comprehension as well as pronunciation.

Any reason why you're using SM-2 over FSRS? In Emurse we're using an algorithm similar to SM-2, mainly because FSRS wasn't out when we started building it. it works well enough because we've come up work arounds for Anki's problem of workload distribution. Looking into FSRS a bit, I am definitely interested in giving this a shot and seeing if it improves it in that area.

5- I don't know if that's even an issue that needs solving with Anki. If that ever becomes an issue with your deck it's probably because you don't add enough cards per day (or preferred time period) and enough cards per subject. I wrote about this in a comment last week I think, but a simple vocab card should actually be like at least 6: vocab image (2), vocab native vocab (2), vocab write out native vocab (2). The text-based answers should still contain an image, too, for better embedding of the knowledge.

People that complain that Anki ends up being just Q -> A memorization are often using it superficially. And even then, won't the algorithm just phase the useless cards out anyways when they become too easy?