Author
Sergey Belousov
Sergey Belousov is a software engineer in Yerevan, Armenia and the sole developer of MemDecks. He designs it, writes it, deploys it, and answers the support email himself. Every post on the MemDecks blog is his; there are no guest authors and no ghostwriting.
Biography
Sergey Belousov is a software engineer with a background in web application development. He lives in Yerevan, Armenia, where learning Armenian as an adult produced both the motivation for MemDecks and most of its design decisions — the transliteration handling, the alphabet game, and the refusal to build a system that punishes a missed week all come from that experience.
He started MemDecks in December 2025 and has been its only developer since. Development is public at github.com/belousovsn.
What he writes about
Vocabulary acquisition, non-Latin scripts, the trade-offs in spaced-repetition design, and the specific mechanisms inside MemDecks. Posts about MemDecks describe what is live and dated; where a design choice cost something, the post says what it cost.
- How MemDecks decides when to show a card againNo scheduler, no intervals, no due queue. The card HP mechanism in full, with the numbers, and what it trades away.
- What learning a non-Latin alphabet actually takesThe letters take days. Reading takes months. What the middle stage needs, grounded in Armenian and Greek.
- Why vocabulary sticks better inside a phrase than on a flashcardWhat a two-sided card leaves out, what a sentence supplies for free, and why Phrase Builder lessons are five words long.
- Games as retrieval practice: what the format buys you and what it does notFour things games genuinely add, four things they cannot do, and the failure mode nobody mentions.
- Choosing your first 200 words in a new languageWhy frequency lists mislead beginners, and a split that works: 130 structural words plus 70 of your own.
- Why a translation app is not a weekend projectThe demo takes an afternoon. What it skips: word identity that survives leaving the database, one pivot language instead of 240 pairs, four providers per card, and progress that outlives the content.
- Why language apps get boring, and what games actually do differentlyPlayers memorise hundreds of things without trying. What transfers to vocabulary, what cannot, and why streaks are the wrong fix.
- Vocabulary first, grammar later: what the first thousand words changeWhy rules land better on words you already have, the three things you cannot postpone, and the failure mode the method produces.
Contact
Email support@memdecks.com. It reaches him directly — corrections to a post are as welcome as bug reports, and both go to the same inbox.