Stele

Dig it up. Clean it. Put it on show.

A museum for everything you want to remember. Words of a language, terms, formulas, dates, names, quotations: each is a find that you clean from dust along your forgetting curve, until it stands in the showcase. You fill the museum yourself. Free, no ads, no account.

English · Русский · Changelog

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The idea

Flashcard apps work, but they feel like a pile of cards. Stele turns the same science (spaced retrieval) into archaeology. Everything you want to keep is a find. Each time you recall it, you brush the dust off. A find that memory holds longer moves up from a dusty shard to clean clay, then to painted, then to the showcase. Nothing is built in. The museum is yours to fill.

How a find lives

1. Dig it up. Start a dig for each collection: a language, anatomy, work terms, capitals, quotations. A find can be a pair (casa — house), a term and its meaning, a phrase with [gaps] to fill, or a question and its answer. Optional extras: a sentence of your own, an association, where you met it, a picture from the phone's camera or gallery. You can add one by voice, select a word in any app and choose Add to Stele, use the quick-settings tile, type a whole list (casa — house per line), or import a CSV or an Anki deck (.apkg).
2. Dust settles. Each find fades along its own forgetting curve (FSRS-4.5). A dusty find gathers a green patina, and the museum shows what is waiting.
3. Clean it. Recall it first, writing it down if you like (typos are forgiven). Then stake one to three chisel strikes on being right, and the brush sweeps the dust off the answer. Pairs are asked both ways, and in a language dig sometimes by ear, through the phone's own voice. Phrases are asked with their gaps covered.
4. Five stages. In the ground → shard → cleaned (holds a week) → restored with its painted ornament (a month) → on show (four months).
5. Glue vessels. Finds on one theme are shards of one vessel: an amphora, a krater, a mask, a coin, a tablet. When every shard is clean, the vessel stands whole, its seams laid in gold the way kintsugi mends a bowl.

The learning science inside

	Technique	In Stele
🔁	Retrieval practice and spacing	Cleanings scheduled by FSRS-4.5, at the retention you choose
🔀	Varied retrieval	Front to back, back to front, by ear, gaps in a phrase
✍️	Generation effect	A sentence of your own with each find; typed answers checked
⛏️	Metacognition, hypercorrection	Chisel strikes staked before looking; sure and wrong cracks the find into the workshop; the restorer's eye shows your calibration
🎭	Discrimination	Forgeries: the genuine find among look-alikes and the ones you mark as confused with. A mix-up is remembered as one
🧩	Chunking	Vessels gather a theme and are only whole when all of it is
🔗	Elaboration	Links between finds: kin, confused with, opposite
🖼️	Dual coding	A picture on a find
🎓	Interleaved testing	The sealed door once a month: twelve questions from every dig, no hints. Three in four right opens a new hall, and the museum front grows
🕳️	Desirable difficulty, reward	Today's test pit: a few finds you haven't seen for longest, and one rare find you've kept for months
📰	Transfer to real text	Sift a text: paste an article or share it from any app. See how much of it you know, confirm the finds met in it (they keep the real sentence), and take new words into a dig

There are no streaks to lose. Dust is what tells you it's time. Russian addresses you as he or she, your choice.

Screens

Privacy

No account, no analytics, no ads, no network. Everything stays on the phone. A backup is one JSON file you save yourself, pictures included. Voice input and pronunciation use the phone's own recogniser and text-to-speech.

Build

./gradlew assembleDebug                          # app.stele.dev
./gradlew assembleDebug -Pdemo                   # app.stele.demo with a museum half dug
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest -Prender [-Plang=ru] # draws the screens to app/build/art
bash tools/capture.sh <dir> en|ru                # phone screenshots of the -Pdemo -Pshots build
python tools/icon.py                             # the launcher icon and docs/logo.png

Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Room, DataStore. Where things live:

• The forgetting curve: domain/Memory.kt.
• Stages, rounds, the test pit, the door, forgeries and sifting: domain/Rules.kt.
• Answer checking: domain/Words.kt.
• Anki import: data/Anki.kt (zstd via aircompressor).
• All the art is drawn in code in ui/art: vessels cut into shards, black-figure ornament, kintsugi seams, the temple front, the sealed door, the brush and its dust.

Cormorant and Manrope are under the SIL Open Font License.

License

MIT · part of Stillcraft