The Daily
10 questions, about two minutes. Everyone gets the same 10. When you finish, you can share your squares, which show how you did without the answers.
How it works
Two minutes for the Daily. A few more to learn what you missed.
FarAbout teaches all 197 countries: where each one is, its flag and its capital. Here is what happens each day, and why the ones you miss keep coming back.
Your day
Today's lesson
You learn the countries you missed, then new ones. New countries arrive two a day. Settings lets you change that to one or three.
Your passport
Each country moves through five levels: New, Learning, Good, Strong and Mastered. Your passport keeps the record.
Misses come back
Each right answer buys a longer gap.
A flag, a capital and a place on the map each keep their own schedule. Get one right when it is due and it waits longer before it returns:
Miss something newer and it starts again in your next lesson. Miss something you have known for weeks and it drops back to a 4-day gap, so one slip doesn't wipe out the work.
Answering early doesn't move anything up, so nobody can cram their way to Mastered. To reach it, you get it right after a 3-week gap.
Why misses come back
Three findings from memory research.
We forget on a curve
Hermann Ebbinghaus charted how memory fades in the 1880s. In 2015, Jaap Murre and Joeri Dros repeated his experiment with one person and 70 hours of lists, and got similar results. Read the study
Gaps help, and longer gaps suit longer memory
A 2006 review by Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues covered 317 experiments. The further ahead you need to remember something, the longer the best gap between practice. Read the summary
Being asked beats rereading, later on
In a 2006 study by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, rereading won on a test minutes later. Students who had been tested remembered more after two days and after a week. Read the summary
These studies used word lists and short texts, and none of them tested FarAbout. We haven't run a study of our own.