Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system

Posted by thomascountz 12/14/2025

Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system(borretti.me)

401 points | 195 commentspage 4

pvdebbe 12/15/2025|

Perfect timing. I just started to teach my wife Finnish so that she'll have easier time with real language lessons when she gets her paperwork sorted out to move here. And I've feverishly been looking for a self-hosted SRS system where I can feed new content to the "decks" and she can consume it on her schedule. Making micro decks that she'd import in Anki wouldn't be very convenient. This would seem perfect to me.

I'm happy to hear other suggestions too?

hiAndrewQuinn 12/15/2025||

Loistavaa, what a perfectly tailored comment for me, I have like 80% the thing for you at https://finnish.andrew-quinn.me/ . Unfortunately I'm all in on Anki but maybe these will sway you nonetheless.

Every 6 months I create around 5000 Anki cards out of the last 6 months for reading practice of the YLE Selkouutiset news, on a sentence by sentence basis: https://github.com/Selkouutiset-Archive/selkokortti

For raw isolated vocabulary my finfreq10k Anki deck can't be beat! https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1149950470

But in your case, and for writing practice, you may also like https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/finyap , which is self-hosted in the sense that a new deck is just a CSV file in "scenarios".

Tsemppiä vaimollesi!

pvdebbe 12/15/2025||

Fantastic tools you've collected here! My rationale for building own decks for my wife is that I'm intending to start slow and easy, and I'll build new cards that are closely tied to days' lessons I'm giving her. I'm hopeful that after a while she gains confidence to start going through premade decks. With anki and similar tools it's important not to just memorize words without having some handle on how to build sentences etc. I spent a lot of time learning Japanese that way, only to find that I maybe memorized words but to build sentences with them...

freshteapot 12/15/2025||

I have something close to this, even a helpful bulk import. But it works on your own account not someone else’s.

The feature

https://learnalist.net/faq/add-a-list-overtime-for-spaced-le...

Bulk import ui https://learnalist.net/toolbox/srs-add-overtime-v1.html

You’re welcome to try it, it is not self-hosted.

I also have a mobile app, and have been thinking of how to simplify the server etc.

Equally been thinking about how to modify the mobile app to work better with a different backend but still maintain notifications (local instead of server).

It used to be in the public domain but I moved it to a private repo. I am open to moving it back, there is just a small part of the code I want to keep private.

wodenokoto 12/15/2025||

I’d like to have deck-wide variables/lookup tables and links.

The decks for studying Japanese that I’d like would have RTK/wanikani style elements used for mnemonics and I’d like them shown in the answer along with a full description and cross references.

Right now I’d have to build a templating system to prebuilt my deck and import it and it’s just a lot of work on top of the work of building the content, but mostly it makes it difficult to edit/update cards while studying.

gompertz 12/16/2025||

Just gave it a whirl and it works pretty good. It doesn't seem like you can force hashcards to let you re-review your deck at anytime though as its on a scheduler. (Imagine this is by design of SRS, but a bit annoying can't override with a flag).

I think uploading a textbook to NotebookLM and getting it to build out a deck for each chapter will be a great study method.

tester457 12/14/2025||

> Your performance and review history is stored in an SQLite database in the same directory as the cards.

Do you use Syncthing or something else to sync your performance history between devices?

zetalyrae 12/15/2025|

Yes.

BeetleB 12/15/2025||

I've been doing spaced repetition in plain text (org files in Emacs) for 7 years now.

org-drill is the original main package, but the newer org-srs is probably better (and supports FSRS).

askl 12/15/2025||

> The thing that makes hashcards unique: it doesn’t use a database.

> Your performance and review history is stored in an SQLite database in the same directory as the cards.

est 12/15/2025||

As Hinton said during an podcast, humans can only learn at the rate of few bits per second. Memory and natural language are of very limited bandwidth.

dtj1123 12/15/2025||

For anyone who prefers reviewing their cards via their phones, this appears to work very nicely on Termux

linkage 12/14/2025||

Obligatory mention of Obsidian’s most popular spaced repetition plugin: https://github.com/st3v3nmw/obsidian-spaced-repetition

It has the least friction for creating flashcards I’ve ever seen. You actually don’t even have to create flashcards - you can add any note to the review queue with one keystroke and record the ease of recall with another command.

_giorgio_ 12/15/2025|

All my notes are in latex.

Any way to use them, or do I have to go through markdown format?

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