Why there are no streaks

There is no streak counter in this product, no flame, and nothing that breaks if you miss a Tuesday. That is a deliberate decision and it costs us something real, so it is worth explaining.

What a streak actually measures

A streak counts consecutive days on which you opened the application. It does not count words learned, words held, or minutes of useful work. It is a measure of app-opening, and it is popular because app-opening is the metric the company is optimising, not the one you are.

The mechanism works, in the narrow sense. Loss aversion is real and a big number you do not want to lose back to zero will get people to open a thing. The trouble is what happens next: the cheapest way to protect a streak is one minute of trivial review, so that is what a lot of people do, and now the number is going up while the learning is not.

What is there instead

• Words held. How many words are currently above your recall target. This can go down, which is the point, and it going down is information rather than a punishment.
• The thirty day forecast. What the next month of reviews looks like at your current pace, so a heavy week is something you see coming rather than something that happens to you.
• Share of a story you can read. The most motivating number we have found, because it is attached to something you actually wanted to do.

What happens when you disappear for a month

Nothing punitive. The reviews pile up, because that is arithmetic, and when you come back the app does not present you with eleven hundred due cards and a guilt trip. It works through the backlog in priority order, oldest and most fragile first, at whatever daily limit you set.

You will have lost some words. That is what forgetting is, and a scheduler that pretended otherwise would be lying to you. The ones you had answered well many times will mostly still be there, which is the entire promise of doing it this way in the first place.