Remember first, then flip

The flash exercise in Practice never opens with the answer. You see the front of the card, you reach for the meaning from memory, and only then do you flip and rate yourself from one to five stars.

That reach is the whole point. In a landmark experiment with foreign-language word pairs, students who kept actively recalling the words scored far higher on a delayed test than students who kept re-reading the same pairs, and the re-readers had no idea they were behind. Re-reading builds a feeling of familiarity, and familiarity is easy to mistake for knowledge. A 2017 meta-analysis spanning hundreds of comparisons confirmed the pattern across labs and real classrooms: testing yourself beats restudying, consistently and by a wide margin.

The star rating closes the loop: it turns your reach into data, and that data decides how soon the card comes back.

So Riff makes you do the hard thing first. The flip is not there to teach you the answer. It is there to check what the reach already taught you.