Learning
Card progress
The percentage on a MemDecks card is score divided by card HP. Card HP is the practice budget the card was given when it was created, derived from how difficult that word is in your study language, and it never changes. Score is practice credit that games add. At 100% the card has had the practice MemDecks thinks that word needs.
The formula
Progress on a card is score ÷ card HP, rounded and clamped to the range 0–100%.
| Value | What it is | When it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Card HP | The practice budget for this word, from 100 to 500 | Never — it is fixed when the card is created |
| Score | Practice credit earned on this card | Every time a game reports an answer about it |
Score is clamped: it can never go below zero and never above the card's card HP. A card at 100% stays at 100%.
Where card HP comes from
When a card is created, MemDecks looks up a difficulty tier for that word in that study language and computes card HP = round(difficulty tier × 4.2), with a floor of 100 and a ceiling of 500.
Difficulty tiers run from 0 to 100 and are produced offline by a scoring pass that considers how rare the word is, how long and how orthographically awkward it is in the target script, how many senses it has, and how much it resembles its English counterpart. The tiers are grouped into four zones — words a child would know, words a learner meets, words an experienced speaker uses, and words that stay in native-speaker territory.
In practice this means a common short word gets the 100 HP floor and a rare, long, script-heavy word gets roughly 400. The 500 ceiling exists as a guard and is not reached by the current tier scale.
How score is earned
Games decide what an answer is worth, and they do not agree. MemDecks receives a number and adds it; it does not second-guess the game.
| Game | What one answer is worth |
|---|---|
| WordBase Quiz | 3 points for a correct first pick, minus 1 for each wrong pick in that round, never below 0. |
| Word Type | The number of letters you did not need revealed, reduced if you used the flip hint or the audio hint. |
A 100 HP card therefore needs around 34 flawless WordBase Quiz rounds to reach 100%, and a 400 HP card needs about four times that. This is why progress moves slowly on hard words, and why it is meant to.
Reading your collection
The Collection tab shows every card in the current study language with its percentage. Sorted by that number, the bottom of the list is the honest answer to "what do I not know yet". There is no separate "learned" pile and no card ever leaves the collection on its own.
A card at 0% is not a failure — it is a card no game has picked yet. A card stuck in the middle after many sessions is the useful signal: that word is resisting, and a different game, one that asks you to produce rather than recognise, is usually the fix.
What the percentage does not mean
It is not a prediction of whether you will remember the word tomorrow, and MemDecks does not claim it is. It is an accounting of practice done against practice estimated as necessary. A card at 100% means you have put in the work that word was budgeted; it does not certify recall.
It is also not comparable between learners. Card HP depends on the word and the language, so "60% average" means nothing without knowing which words.