Decks#

Decks are one of the fundamental units used to organize learning content in Retentio. You can think of a deck as a learning container for a specific topic, domain, or learning goal. It holds your facts (the content you enter) and the cards (what you review), together with settings that control how that deck is structured and paced.

In most cases, each deck should focus on a single area of knowledge. For example, it may be used to organize vocabulary for a language, key concepts from a subject, or a set of professional terms. By grouping related content into the same deck, you can manage study materials more clearly and build a structured knowledge system over time.

Fields#

When you create or edit a deck, you define fields: the column names for that deck (for example English, 中文, Example Sentence, or Note). Fields describe what each column means and how labels appear when you edit facts and review cards.

Fields do not hold study material—only names and order. Renaming or reordering fields changes the deck’s schema; fact entries still line up by position (entry 0 is always the first column, entry 1 the second, and so on).

A deck can have one column or many. Choose names that match how you think about the topic so facts and cards stay easy to manage later.

New cards per day#

When you create a deck, you also set how many new cards to introduce each day (called rate in the API). This controls how quickly brand-new cards enter your study queue—not how many total reviews you do per day.

A higher rate introduces new material faster.
A lower rate keeps a steadier, gentler pace.

Retentio spaces new cards evenly across the day. For example, a rate of 20 means roughly one new card every 72 minutes; a rate of 10 means about one every 144 minutes.

Summary#

A deck groups one topic’s facts and cards, defines column fields, and sets your daily new-card pace. Clear decks and field layouts make the rest of Retentio—adding facts, generating cards, and reviewing—more predictable and efficient.