Every flashcard is always in one of four states. The state determines how the card behaves during a review session, how it's labeled on the deck detail screen, and, for cards in the Review state, whether it also carries a maturity label. This article defines that vocabulary. Later articles in this section build on it.
The four states
- New. The card has never been reviewed. It hasn't entered the FSRS schedule yet.
- Learning. The card is new to you and being introduced through short, closely-spaced steps before it settles into a normal review interval.
- Review. The card has graduated out of Learning and is now on a spaced interval that can range from a day to several years, depending on how well you know it.
- Relearning. The card was in Review, you missed it (rated it Again), and it's being re-introduced through the same kind of short steps as Learning.
How ratings move a card between these states, and what each rating does to its schedule, is covered in Rating your recall. The stability and difficulty values behind Review-state scheduling are explained in Learning methodology.
How states appear on the deck detail screen
On a deck's card grid, each card shows a small status badge. For Review cards, this badge splits depending on whether the card is scheduled for study right now:
| State | Schedule | Badge shown |
|---|---|---|
| New | — | New |
| Learning or Relearning | — | Learning |
| Review | Due now or overdue | Due |
| Review | Scheduled in the future | Upcoming |
Learning and Relearning are two different states internally, but they share one badge. There's currently no screen in the app that shows them separately: the review session's own progress counters group them the same way. The distinction still matters to the scheduler (it's part of what decides how the card is stepped back in), it just isn't something you need to tell apart visually.
Maturity: Young and Mature
Maturity only applies to cards in the Review state. It splits Review into two further buckets:
- Young. The card's interval is under 21 days.
- Mature. The card's interval is 21 days or longer.
This threshold is fixed at 21 days across the app. It isn't a fifth state alongside New, Learning, Review, and Relearning: a Mature card is still, underneath, a Review-state card. New, Learning, and Relearning cards don't have a maturity label at all, since maturity is really a statement about how far a card has progressed along its Review interval.
Maturity isn't shown on the deck detail screen or during a review session. It appears later, once you get to your review statistics, where cards are broken down by New, Learning, Relearning, Young, and Mature.
Why this matters
New, Learning, Review, and Relearning are what a review session actually queues and counts. New and Review are also what a deck's daily limits are measured against; Learning and Relearning are exempt from both limits and always come back when their step is due. The next two articles cover the rating that moves a card between these states, and how a session pulls cards from them.