The short answer
Spaced repetition is one idea: review a word just before you would have forgotten it, because a review that feels slightly hard is the one that lasts. Meeting it again immediately costs the same minute and buys almost nothing. The gap that works grows with how long you need the word for, so a schedule that starts at one day, moves to six, then stretches further each time you get it right is doing the sensible thing. A wrong answer sends the word back to tomorrow, which is not a punishment but the only honest reading of what just happened. A good session is short, slightly uncomfortable, and ends when the queue is empty rather than when you feel finished.
Forgetting is fast, and then it is slow
Hermann Ebbinghaus spent the early 1880s memorising nonsense syllables and testing himself at intervals, and published the result in 1885. The shape he found is the one every learner recognises: most of what you lose, you lose quickly, and what survives the first days survives much longer.
That shape is the whole argument. If loss is steepest at the start, the useful moment to intervene is early. If what survives is durable, the useful thing to do afterwards is wait longer before checking again. A fixed daily drill spends the same effort on a word you learned this morning and a word you have known for a month, which is why people who study hard still forget at the counter.
Swedish adds its own wrinkle. A word you learned in writing and never heard can be lost in a different way: it is there, but it does not arrive fast enough to be useful in a sentence somebody is still speaking.
| In Swedish | What it means | When you use it |
|---|---|---|
| Jag har glömt ordet. | I've forgotten the word. | Honest, short, and it usually gets the word handed back to you. |
| Jag har det på tungan. | It's on the tip of my tongue. | Buys a second of silence without switching the conversation to English. |
| Vad heter det nu igen? | What's it called again? | Said to yourself out loud, and Swedes say it that way too. |
| Kan du påminna mig? | Can you remind me? | At work, when the word you need is one a colleague used yesterday. |
The gap is the ingredient, not the effort
The comparison that matters is not study against no study. It is the same amount of study packed together against the same amount spread out. Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted and Rohrer went through the literature on that question in 2006 and pooled 839 assessments from 317 experiments across 184 articles. Spreading wins, and it wins by a lot.
Their 2008 follow-up asked the practical question: how long a gap. The answer is that the best gap depends on how long you need to keep the material. For a test a week away it sits around a fifth of that week. For a test a year away it falls to something nearer a twentieth of the year, which is still weeks rather than days. The general rule you can act on: the longer you want to hold a word, the longer you should wait before checking it.
This is why an expanding schedule beats a fixed one. Not because the software is clever, but because a word you have already survived three gaps with does not need tomorrow, and a word you missed this morning does.
Recall beats re-reading, and it feels worse
Roediger and Karpicke ran the experiment that settles the other half of this in 2006. Students read a passage, then either read it again or took a recall test on it, the same number of times. Tested five minutes later, the re-readers did better. Tested two days and a week later, the ones who had been made to recall did substantially better.
Read that pairing again, because it explains why most people study the wrong way. Re-reading feels productive immediately and is worth little later. Recalling feels shaky immediately and is worth a great deal later. Your sense of how well a session went is close to backwards.
So a review is a question, not a display. Look at the English, produce the Swedish, and only then turn the card. If you turn it first because you were not sure, you have re-read rather than recalled, and the word will need the same minute again next week.
| In Swedish | What it means | When you use it |
|---|---|---|
| Vänta, jag kommer på det. | Wait, it's coming to me. | The sentence to say instead of giving up. The pause is the part that works. |
| Hur säger man ... på svenska? | How do you say ... in Swedish? | With the English word in the gap. Ask after you have tried, not before. |
| Jag övar varje dag, lite grann. | I practise every day, a little. | The answer to the question Swedes ask when they hear you are learning. |
| Det sitter inte än. | It hasn't stuck yet. | About a word or a rule. Sitta is the verb Swedes use for knowledge that has settled. |
What the schedule does with your answer
Ours runs SM-2, the algorithm Piotr Woźniak published for SuperMemo and the one most review software still descends from. It is simpler than its reputation.
A word you have just met comes back the next day. Get it right and the next gap is six days. Get it right again and the gap is multiplied each time by a number attached to that particular word, its ease factor, which drifts up when the word is easy for you and down when it is not, and never falls below 1.3. So an easy word walks from one day to six to about a fortnight to a month, and a word you keep hesitating on stays close.
Get it wrong and the word returns tomorrow, with its count reset. Nothing else is taken away from you. Once a word has held a gap of three weeks it is counted as settled rather than in progress, which is the threshold the counters on the review page use.
The schedule is kept on the server, which means a signed-in account. Without one you can still review, and the words still come back, but the timing resets with the browser rather than following you to your phone.
What twelve minutes should feel like
Short. The queue is what the schedule decided is due, so an honest session is over when it is empty, usually well inside a quarter of an hour. Adding more because you feel like it is how people end up reviewing words that were fine.
Slightly uncomfortable. Two or three words out of ten should make you pause. If nothing does, your gaps are too short and you are paying for reassurance. If almost everything does, you have been away too long, and the fix is to do it tomorrow as well, not to do more of it today.
Spoken, at least in part. Say the Swedish out loud even alone, because the word you can write and cannot say is not yet a word you own. This is also why the games belong next to the review rather than instead of it: they put the same words under a clock, which is the condition you will meet at a counter. The argument for that is in why playing works when a list does not.
And it is daily or it is not much. A gap of one day only exists if you come back on that day. Twelve minutes every morning beats ninety minutes on Sunday, and that is the one habit that decides how long the whole thing takes.
| In Swedish | What it means | When you use it |
|---|---|---|
| Jag repeterar gamla ord. | I'm revising old words. | Repetera is the ordinary Swedish verb for revision, not repetition. |
| Det här ordet fastnar inte. | This word won't stick. | Fastna is to get stuck, and it is what Swedes say about vocabulary. |
| Nu sitter det. | Now it's stuck. | Said with some satisfaction, about a word or a rule you finally own. |
| Jag tar tio minuter varje morgon. | I do ten minutes every morning. | Explaining your routine. Ta is the natural verb for spending time on something. |
What a schedule cannot do for you
It cannot teach a rule. A word that comes back every six days is not explaining why huset has an ending glued on, and drilling it without the rule is memorising forms one at a time. The grammar pages exist for that half, one rule per page.
It cannot choose your words. A schedule optimises whatever you feed it, so feeding it a general frequency list means an efficiently remembered list of words that are not the ones in your stairwell. The case for keeping a private list beside the course is in how many Swedish words you actually need. That is truest in the first weeks in the country, which your first month of Swedish without a personnummer goes through.
And it cannot make you speak. Recognition schedules beautifully. Producing a sentence with a person waiting does not, and never will, come from a queue of cards. Review is what keeps the raw material alive; the rest happens at a counter, at a språkcafé, or in a conversation you were not ready for.
Questions people ask
- What is spaced repetition, in plain terms?
- Reviewing something just before you would have forgotten it, rather than at a fixed frequency. The gap grows every time you get it right, because a word you have already held for a fortnight does not need checking tomorrow. The effect has been measured many times: Cepeda and colleagues pooled 839 assessments from 317 experiments in 2006 and found spread-out study beating packed study on the same total time.
- How often should I review Swedish vocabulary?
- Daily, briefly, and let the schedule decide which words. A new word comes back the next day, then after about six days, then at gaps that stretch each time you get it right. The part you control is turning up: a one day gap only exists if you open the app on that day. Ten to fifteen minutes each morning is more effective than an hour and a half once a week.
- Is spaced repetition better than just reading Swedish?
- They do different jobs. Reading feeds you new words in context, which a card cannot. Recalling keeps them. Roediger and Karpicke showed in 2006 that re-reading wins on a test five minutes later and loses badly on a test a week later, which is exactly the trade a learner cares about. Read for input, review for retention, and do not mistake the comfortable one for the effective one.
- What happens when I get a word wrong?
- It comes back tomorrow and its count starts again. That is the only consequence. The word keeps the difficulty rating it has built up, so a word you have historically found easy does not become a hard word because of one bad morning, and a word you keep missing settles into short gaps until it stops being missed.
- Do I need an account for the review schedule?
- To have it follow you, yes. The per-word schedule is stored server-side, so signing in is what lets a word due on Thursday be due on Thursday on your phone as well as your laptop. Without an account you can still review and still see the words again, but the timing lives in that browser only.
- How long should one review session be?
- Until the due queue is empty, which is usually ten to fifteen minutes. Doing extra means reviewing words the schedule had already judged safe, and that time buys very little. If the queue is enormous, it is because you skipped days: clear what you can, come back tomorrow, and it shrinks quickly.
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