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Flashcards

A flashcard is a single question-and-answer unit that appears in your study queue. We covered why this works in Getting Started. Here, let's look at what it looks like in practice in Tsunagi.

Card types​

When you write a note, you choose which card type to use. Tsunagi offers the following built-in types:

  • Basic (front/back): the classic question/answer format. The most general-purpose type, and a good starting point for most things that come to mind.
  • Basic (reversed): the same note generates two separate cards, one in each direction ("question → answer" and "answer → question"). Useful for two-way relationships (for example, a word and its translation).
  • Basic (optional reversed): the same as the previous type, but you can choose on a per-note basis whether the reverse card gets generated.
  • Cloze (fill-in-the-blank): turns specific words within a sentence into blanks, with the rest of the sentence left as context. If you mark more than one separate blank within a longer passage, each blank becomes its own card.
  • Write the answer: instead of choosing an answer, you're asked to type it, and it's compared against the correct answer. The type that pushes active recall the hardest.
  • Multiple choice: you choose the answer from among several options.
  • True/False: you decide whether a statement is true or false.
  • Image occlusion: hides a specific region of an image, and you try to recall what's hidden (for example, a label on a diagram).

Note: Tsunagi currently doesn't offer a screen for designing your own card template (at the HTML/CSS level) beyond these built-in types. You can customize field content, font, and (in image occlusion) the mask itself, but the built-in types determine the card's basic layout.

Each type's fields, full examples, and tips are covered one by one in the Note Type Guides section.

How to write a good flashcard​

This is a general best practice, independent of which app you're using:

  • Minimum information principle: a card should ask about a single thing. Instead of cramming three questions like "what is X, how does it work, and what's its history" into one card, make three separate cards. Smaller cards are both easier to recall and let the scheduling algorithm track each piece independently.
  • Avoid vague or overly broad questions: instead of an open-ended question like "what do you know about photosynthesis?", ask something specific with a single correct answer, like "which organelle converts light energy into chemical energy during photosynthesis?"

Now let's look at where flashcards come from: the note and flashcard distinction.