MandaManda schedules your vocabulary reviews using spaced repetition: instead of drilling every word equally, it shows each word right around the moment you're about to forget it, then pushes the next review further out each time you succeed. Words you find hard come back often; words you know well drift to weeks or months apart. The scheduler is an SM-2-style algorithm, the same family used by Anki.
Everything below happens automatically: you never set intervals by hand. You just rate how a review went, and the schedule takes care of the rest. The defaults suit most learners, but the Study & review tab in Settings lets you change the review pace, the maximum interval, and (under Advanced) the raw ease and multiplier values described below.
Rating a review
Whenever you review a word (in Flashcards, Cloze, Due for Review, or straight from a Word Detail page) you grade yourself with one of four buttons. Each button previews the interval it will schedule, so you can see the consequence before you tap:
| Again | You forgot it. The word resets to a 1-day interval, counts as a lapse, and comes straight back around in the session. |
| Hard | You got it, but it was a struggle. The interval grows only gently (about 1.2×, and always at least one day longer). |
| Good | A normal, correct recall. The interval grows by your current ease factor (see below). |
| Easy | Effortless. The interval jumps further than Good (an extra 1.3× on top), and the word's ease rises. |
The ease factor
Each word carries an ease factor: a personal difficulty multiplier that controls how fast its intervals grow. Every word starts at 2.5, and your ratings nudge it over time:
- Easy raises ease by 0.15 (up to a ceiling of 3.0).
- Hard lowers it by 0.15.
- Again lowers it by 0.2.
- Good leaves it unchanged.
Ease never drops below 1.3, so even a word you repeatedly miss keeps making a little forward progress rather than getting stuck reviewing every single day forever.
How intervals grow
A brand-new word starts with a 1-day interval. From there, a run of Good ratings on an average-ease word stretches the gaps out quickly: roughly 1 day → 3 days → 1 week → 2–3 weeks → over a month, and so on, capped at one year. To stop a big batch of words added on the same day from all coming due together forever, Manda adds a small random ±5% "fuzz" to intervals of three days or more.
Graduating to Known Words
A word doesn't stay in your Study List forever. Once a Study List word has been reviewed at least 4 times and its interval reaches 21 days or more (Anki's definition of a "mature" card), Manda automatically promotes it to your Known Words. That keeps your active Study List focused on words you're still learning, while everything you've genuinely mastered is moved aside but still tracked.
Known Words aren't gone: if one ever comes due again on its schedule, it will still surface for review, so long-term retention is protected.
One schedule, many ways to review
Flashcards, Cloze, the Due for Review list, and the rating buttons on Word Detail pages all feed the exact same schedule. However you choose to study a word, its next review date is updated in one shared place, so there's no double-counting and no conflicting schedules. Your review data syncs with everything else via the app's cloud sync and local backups.