Why vocabulary learned with SRS sticks

You learn 20 words today and three days later they are gone. Your memory is not the problem — that is the forgetting curve, and everyone has one. SRS exists to hit it at the right moment.

The core idea

Instead of reviewing everything daily, SRS shows you only the words you are about to forget. Get one right and the gap stretches: 1 day → 3 days → 1 week → 1 month. Get it wrong and it comes back sooner.

Why it works

Reviewing right at the edge of forgetting forces a real act of recall — and that effort is what moves a word into long-term memory. Re-reading something you still remember clearly does almost nothing.

Using it properly

• Do not cram 200 words in one day and then vanish for a week. SRS only works if you open it every day.
• Ten words a day, consistently, beats a hundred followed by an unmanageable backlog.
• Give every card an example sentence. "Apply" alone is much harder to hold than "apply for a job".