A calmer way to study, built by someone who needed one

Why it exists

Like a lot of people, I started learning Japanese with spaced repetition and came to dread the app, not the method. Loading a big collection was slow. Take a few days off and the review pile became a wall of hundreds of cards, a remarkably effective way to make you quit. The science was sound; the experience around it was punishing.

Mekuri is the response: keep the proven scheduling, rebuild everything around it to feel calm. A daily pile that stays capped. Sessions measured in the minutes you actually have. A kind path back after a break, not a mountain of guilt.

What it stands for

• Gentle by default. No infinite piles, no streak guilt, no dark patterns. The app should fit your life, not nag you about it.
• Your work is yours. Mekuri reads the Anki decks you already built, history and all, so years of effort move with you, an on-ramp, not a cage.
• Private by design. A private, per-user study space, with no public deck marketplace. That is both a principle and, in a time of textbook-deck takedowns, a practical safeguard.
• Upfront about what it is. Including, right now, that it is not finished.

What is actually built

This is a real, working application its maker uses every day, not a mock-up. The development version runs the capped daily review loop and time-budgeted sessions, imports Anki .apkg files with media and review history, renders real card layouts including cloze and furigana, and includes a full kana trainer. It works in the browser, on desktop and phone.

It is also not ready for everyone yet: no accounts or public sign-up, no native apps or cloud sync, and the first-party Japanese courses are still being written. Closing that gap is the work now.

The plan is deliberately small: a calm, durable tool that earns its keep, not a growth-at-all-costs app.

The name

Mekuri comes from the Japanese sense of turning a page, the small, satisfying motion of a flashcard flipping to reveal its answer. It is the whole loop the app is built around.