A gloss without a sentence has no tense in conversation
눈 = eye / snow will pass a quiz. It will not appear at a table. Words retrieve when they have a sentence and a scene. Example: save 결국 as “eventually” and you have no slot in a story. Save it inside “버스 놓쳐서 결국 걸어갔어요.” The seat is the memory, not the gloss. Failure case: three near-synonyms on one card, all swiped as “I know this.” You can pick them on a test. In speech none of them arrive. One card, one sentence. Greed waits a week.
Twenty new cards a day is collecting, not learning
Every new word is a review debt. Twenty arrivals make day four feel like homework. People close homework. A closed list does not get remembered. Three to five new items. Keep the misses; push the rest. If “today’s pile” passes ten, take a day off from adding. The pleasure of save is real. Do not confuse the button with skill. Retrieval count is skill.
Deleting a miss throws away the expensive signal
A miss is not a character flaw. It means the gap was too wide. Pull the card forward. Delete it and the deck looks clean; a month later you meet the word as a stranger. Routine: a miss tonight and tomorrow. A hit skips three days. That is a schedule, not a verdict on you. The pretty “unknowns only” deck is for screenshots. A working deck is a little dirty. The dirty one makes speech.
Repair day (12 minutes) — do not start a new list
If the list is already broken, do not open a fresh app. Pick ten cards. Give each a sentence. Leave the other two hundred closed. Twelve minutes: five flipping ten cards, four turning two misses into your sentences, three writing tomorrow’s date only. A night spent “organizing” is not study. Twenty words crammed on Sunday still work the night before a quiz. They almost never work in an order a month later. Smaller retrievals are less heroic, and they stay.
COMMON MISTAKES
Where vocabulary keeps failing
Gloss only, no sentence — conversation has no tense. Twenty new cards daily — the queue beats the person. Deleting misses — you removed the review you needed. Eye-skimming and trusting the glow — recognition is not retrieval. A week of app shopping — five cards tonight come first.
If you already have a pile, pick five cards with no sentence and add one line each. That is one failure pattern, cut, for today.