How the repetition schedule works
Each word climbs a ladder from an hour to a month between reviews, and your easy, normal, and hard replies bend that schedule around you.
Pinguingo runs on spaced repetition: each word comes back right around the moment you’d otherwise start to forget it. You never plan a review session or open a deck. The schedule lives in the chat, and every card that arrives is the word that was due.
The ladder
Every word climbs a fixed ladder. Each time a card goes out, the word moves up a step, and every step waits longer than the one before it:
Day one is deliberately the busy day: add a word in the morning, rate promptly, and you’ll usually see it three times before evening. That front-loading carries the word through the first night, when forgetting is fastest. After that the gaps stretch out, until the word only drops by once a month to prove it’s still there.
What easy, normal, and hard do
Your reply reschedules the word from that moment:
- Easy skips a step. A card that would’ve returned in six hours comes back tomorrow instead.
- Normal keeps the word on schedule: it returns when its step says so.
- Hard drops the word two steps back. A card that had reached the one-week step returns the next day, and a young card comes straight back with your next flashcard.
So rating a word hard doesn’t punish you. It just buys that word extra repetitions while it’s still slippery.
When a card actually lands
The ladder decides when a word is ready. Whether it lands in your chat that minute depends on a few things layered on top:
- Your pace. Cards go out on the rhythm you picked, from every 30 minutes to every few hours, and a word that’s ready rides the next slot. Every 2 hours is the fastest pace on Basic; Premium and the free trial go up to every 30 minutes.
- One card at a time. After the first card of the day, the next one waits until you’ve rated the previous one, so the schedule can never run ahead of you.
- Daily limits. At most 7 cards a day on Basic and 30 on Premium (the trial counts as Premium), so a big list never floods the chat.
- Your quiet hours. Nothing arrives outside the hours you set, or while you’ve paused.
Don’t want a word on the ladder?
You can drop any word instead of riding it up. Text “Delete last word” to remove the card that just arrived, or name the word directly, like “Delete gato”. It leaves your list right away and won’t come back.
Rate what actually happened, not what you hoped. A hesitant hard costs you seconds of extra practice; an optimistic easy hides the word for weeks before you find out it never stuck.
Want to tune the rhythm around your week? See Studying while you’re busy, or browse everything you can text Pinguingo.