Why do we forget what we just learned?
In 1885, psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus published his famous "forgetting curve": without review, we lose roughly 50% of new information within an hour, and more than 70% within a day. That is exactly why cramming 50 new words in one evening and never touching them again almost guarantees you will forget most of them within days — not because you are bad at learning, but because your brain is wired to discard information it never sees again.
How does Spaced Repetition (SRS) actually work?
A Spaced Repetition System solves that exact problem with one simple rule: review a word right before you are about to forget it, instead of on a fixed schedule or all in one sitting. Every time you recall a word correctly, the gap before its next review stretches out (1 day → 3 days → 1 week → 1 month...). If you forget it, it comes back sooner. The result is your brain gets nudged at exactly the moment information is about to slip out of short-term memory, pushing it into long-term memory instead.
This is not just theory — over a century of cognitive science research consistently shows SRS beats one-time cramming by a wide margin, even when the total study time is identical.
How Palingo applies SRS
Palingo's entire vocabulary review system is built around SRS: every one of its 3,000+ practical words carries its own review schedule that automatically adjusts based on how well you actually remember it. You don't plan anything — just open the app each day, and the system automatically surfaces exactly the words you're about to forget.
Pairing SRS with Active Recall — actively trying to recall a meaning before checking the answer, instead of passively re-reading — is widely considered the single most effective combination for long-term language retention. That is exactly why Palingo builds its reviews as active flashcards, word-matching minigames and recall prompts, rather than a static word list to skim.
Is 10 minutes a day really enough?
Yes. Because SRS only ever surfaces the words that actually need review right now, you're never re-reviewing your entire vocabulary every day — a typical session only covers a few dozen words, which fits comfortably into 10 focused minutes. A few well-timed minutes daily consistently beats one long 2-hour cram session followed by a week of silence.
Start today
You don't need to track a review schedule or guess which words need attention today — Palingo does that for you. Download it for free, study a few minutes a day, and let Spaced Repetition handle the rest.