A review session is where cards actually get studied. This article covers the mechanics of running one: what gets queued, in what order, what caps it, and what happens as it winds down. How to flip and rate an individual card is covered in Rating your recall. The states a card can be in are covered in Card states and maturity.
Starting a session
You start a review session from a deck. See Understanding decks for how a deck signals it has cards ready.
Reading the progress header
At the top of the screen, a card counter shows your position in the session, for example 4 / 23, with a progress bar beneath it.
Next to the counter, three small colored counters break the remaining cards down by state: New, Learning (which also covers Relearning), and Due. These update the moment you rate a card, without waiting for anything to sync.
Note
The total in the counter is fixed when the session starts. It doesn't grow if a card becomes newly due while you're mid-session, so it's a snapshot of what was ready at the start, not a live count.
Queue order
Cards aren't shown in a fixed or random order. Within what's available, flangu prioritizes:
- Learning and Relearning cards that are due, oldest due date first.
- Review cards, ordered by how likely you are to have forgotten them, least likely to recall first.
- New cards, in the order they were created.
You don't need to manage this. As you work through the session, flangu fetches more cards in the background before you run out, so there's no pause between the cards you started with and the next ones.
Daily limits in action
Each deck has two separate daily limits: Max new cards/day and Max reviews/day. Review cards draw from the reviews limit. New cards draw from both limits at once: introducing one counts against the new-cards limit and against the reviews limit. See Deck settings for how to change these numbers.
Learning and Relearning cards are never capped by either limit. A card mid-step always comes back when its timer runs out, even in a deck that has otherwise hit its limit for the day.
Setting Max new cards/day to 0 pauses new cards for that deck for the day. Setting Max reviews/day to 0 pauses both review cards and new cards, since new cards draw from it too. This is why a session can end while Review cards are still due: you've hit the deck's reviews limit for the day, not run out of cards. Learning and Relearning cards keep appearing regardless.
Near-due leeway and the countdown
When the queue runs dry, flangu checks whether a Learning or Relearning card is about to come due.
- If one is due within 15 minutes, it's shown right away. The session continues without any visible interruption.
- If the next one is further out than that, the session shows a completion screen with a live countdown to it, instead of ending outright. When the countdown reaches zero, the card appears automatically and the session resumes.
- If no Learning or Relearning card is upcoming at all, the session ends.
This is what lets short-interval steps (a few minutes apart, from an Again rating) stay inside the same sitting instead of forcing you to reopen the deck.
Deleting a card mid-session
Each card in a session can be deleted from the same menu used to edit it. Deleting removes the card from the deck immediately, and the session advances to the next card on its own; there's no separate confirmation step to move past it.
Session end
When the queue is empty and no near-due card is waiting, the session ends. A Session Statistics button and a Return Home button appear. Session statistics are covered separately in a future article.