2026-04-01 · 2 min read
Streaks done right
Habit-tracking is the strongest force in any learning app. It is also the easiest force to corrupt.
The bad version: an app that counts every day you opened it, regardless of whether you learned anything. People keep their streak alive by tapping ten cards while waiting for coffee. The streak number goes up. Their language doesn't.
We wanted streaks to mean something. Here's how we set them up.
A streak day costs effort, not seconds
A day counts toward your streak only if you complete a real review session — not a token tap. The threshold is small, but it's enough that you can't pretend.
If you genuinely can't review today, you have streak freezes. Use one and your streak survives the gap. We give freezes for hitting weekly goals, not for paying us money. They aren't a premium feature.
XP is capped on purpose
Most apps reward you with infinite XP — the more cards you grind, the more XP you earn. That sounds motivating until you realise it punishes the right learning behaviour.
The right behaviour is: do your due reviews, learn a small batch of new words, leave the app for the day. Returning tomorrow is what makes the spaced-repetition algorithm work. Spending an extra hour ploughing through ahead-of-schedule cards just shifts every future review off-schedule.
So we cap the XP curve. After your daily review and your new-word batch, additional sessions earn you small XP, but the headline number plateaus. The reward signal points to the behaviour we want, not to the longest grind.
Leaderboards we can stand behind
Our weekly leaderboard ranks by XP. Because XP is capped per day, it ranks by consistency over a week, not by who had the most free time on Saturday. A casual learner who reviewed every day will out-rank someone who binged 800 cards on Sunday and ignored the app the rest of the week.
That's the version of "competitive" we wanted: not who tried hardest, but who showed up most often.
What gamification doesn't fix
A streak doesn't make you better at tones. XP doesn't make you remember vocabulary. The trophy isn't the point — it's the wrapper. Underneath, the only things that work are spaced repetition, harsh grading, and time.
We build the wrapper because the wrapper is what gets you to come back. The come-back is what makes the underneath possible.