The Leitner system: the card box with five compartments
Sebastian Leitner · “So lernt man lernen”, 1972 · 3 min read
Science journalist Sebastian Leitner was looking for a practical form of spaced repetition — and found the card box with several compartments. His book became a perennial seller, and almost every vocabulary app in the world is still built on his idea.
The rules
All new cards go into compartment 1, which is reviewed daily. Known? The card moves one compartment forward. Not known? Back to compartment 1. Compartment 2 is reviewed every two days, 3 weekly, 4 every two weeks, 5 monthly. Cards from the last compartment count as learned.
The trick: you automatically see hard words often and easy ones rarely. Study time flows to where it is needed.
What is on the card decides
The system only governs repetition. If the card just says “Kartoffel — potato”, every review remains a guessing game. If there is a memory picture on it, the card is usually done by the second look.
And with Mindpop?
At its core Mindpop is a card box in which every card carries a memory picture — with a quiz that automatically decides when a word comes back.
Today Mindpop implements the memory-picture method — further learning methods from this series will follow in the app step by step.