There is a comfortable way to study vocabulary and an uncomfortable one, and the comfortable one barely works. Reading a word list feels like progress because the words look familiar. Then a waiter asks a question, or an exam asks you to choose between four options, and the familiarity evaporates.
The uncomfortable version — being made to produce or choose an answer — is called active recall, and it is the single most reliable way to move a word into long-term memory. That is why EnjoyCards builds a quiz out of the deck you already have.
What the quiz mode does
Open a deck and start a quiz, and EnjoyCards generates multiple-choice questions from your own cards, up to 20 at a time:
- Forward questions — you see the word and choose the meaning from four options.
- Backward questions — you see the meaning and choose the correct word.
- The two directions alternate, so you are not always answering the easier way.
- Distractors are pulled from other cards with the same part of speech, so you cannot eliminate options just by spotting the odd one out.
Every question is built from cards you are actually studying, in the language pair you set. Nothing is imported, and nothing is invented — the quiz is a second way into material you were going to review anyway.
Why choosing beats recognising
Recognising a word and retrieving a word are different mental acts, and only one of them is tested in real life. When you answer a multiple-choice question, you have to search for the answer and compare candidates — the same operation you perform in conversation or on an exam. Even a wrong guess strengthens the memory more than re-reading does, provided you find out it was wrong.
Two habits make a quiz session worth more than a duplicate review:
- Guess before you settle. Commit to an option rather than hovering. The effort of deciding is the point.
- Read the correction. When you get one wrong, the correct option is the moment the memory forms. Do not click past it.
Quizzes and spaced repetition are not rivals
It helps to see the two modes as doing different jobs. FSRS scheduling decides when each word should come back, so you review at the moment recall is about to slip. Quiz mode changes the shape of the question, so you are not answering the same prompt the same way every time.
A rhythm that uses both: run your due reviews as usual, then once or twice a week run a quiz over the whole deck as a check. If a word you have been rating Good keeps showing up wrong in the quiz, that is useful information — the card may be too thin, and worth editing.
One honest note: this is a study quiz built from your own cards, not a set of official exam questions. It will not predict your HSK score. It will tell you which words have not stuck yet.
To try it, download EnjoyCards free, open any deck, and start a quiz — or first read why spaced repetition works.