How the learning path is structured

A typical flashcard app shows you words from a shuffled deck: whatever comes up next, comes up next. Immer wiederholen works differently in two ways at once: topics unlock in a sensible order rather than at random, and each topic is tested at increasing depth - from plain recognition all the way to recalling something from memory with no hint at all.

Topics unlock each other

The same verb can have several independently tracked quirks at once - say, its Partizip II form, its Präteritum form, and a stem-vowel change in the present tense. These are separate things, but it makes sense to drill them close together: answer one correctly, and the related topics for that same word move closer, instead of waiting in their own unrelated queue.

Some topics have an even stricter relationship: they don't appear at all until their basics are covered. The advanced version of a topic - recalling a verb from a described situation and putting it in the right form, with no hint at all about which word it is - stays locked until the learner has answered the plain "verb -> form" version for that same word at least once. The point is that a harder task never shows up before there's at least some foothold in memory for it.

From recognition to recall

Picking the right option out of four and recalling a word on your own are different skills. The first is recognition, the second is recall - and it's recall that actually lets you speak the language, not just guess correctly on a test. That's why many multiple-choice questions are followed by another step right away: a short, hint-free task where you type out the whole phrase from memory.

The most advanced topics push this idea to its limit: not just the answer options disappear, but the source verb itself does too. The learner sees only a translated scenario - and has to recall which word it's about and immediately put it in the right form. This is exactly the case where a topic stays locked until the form has been drilled at least once in its simpler version first - otherwise the task would be an unsolvable riddle, not practice.