Italian deck · version 13 · measured 2026-10-29 09:54 UTC

Every measurement of the Italian deck.

This is what is true of the Italian deck in production now: 1,035 cards teaching 551 distinct words, 1.88 cards a word. It is 149 words from 700, Flua's A1 target.

Every card is checked against the rules the deck is built to each time the deck is built. The measurements below are computed here from the cards learners download, again whenever the deck is republished, and where a figure misses its rule, the page says so.

The deck at a glance

983 cards teach words and 52 explain grammar. A word is a dictionary form, so the forms of one verb count once: the deck teaches each form you will hear as its own card, which is why it holds more cards than words. The forms it teaches make up 71% of all words spoken in Italian film and TV subtitles.

1,035cards in the deck
551distinct words · 149 to go to A1's 700
1.88cards a word, grammar cards included
52grammar cards
27phrases taught as one unit
Checked when the deck is built

The rules this page doesn't re-check.

Some of the rules every card is built to can only be checked with the deck's full build records, so they run on every card each time the deck is built, before it can be published: one new thing per card (every word of every sentence taught by an earlier card letter for letter, the card's own new word, or a regular variant of a word taught earlier, such as a plural or an elided article, shown after the card that explains its pattern), every meaning of a word taught before it is used, words taught in the order people use them, explanations that use only words already taught, and complete audio on every card. Their card-by-card results aren't published with the deck, so this page doesn't restate them; everything below is measured here, from the cards learners download.

Common words first

71% of spoken words, from 1,035 cards.

Coverage is the share of all words spoken in Italian film and TV subtitles that are exactly a form the deck has taught by that card. It is 43% after 100 cards, 57% after 300 cards, and 63% after 500 cards. Common words come first, so the curve rises fast and then flattens.

Sentence length

Every sentence fits in 10 words; the median has 5.

Words per sentence across all 1,035 cards, counted in words as written, a joined form like l'idea counting once. Mean 5.6, median 5, longest 10. The rule is a hard limit of 10, so a sentence can be read at a glance.

By position, in steps of 50 cards. The deck is built to start short and grow: mostly 2 to 4 words in the first 100 cards and never more than 7 there, then a natural 4 to 8. In this deck's first 100 cards, 91 sentences have 2 to 4 words and 1 has more than 7 (the longest has 8); the first sentence of 4 or more words is card 10. Orange bars mark an early stretch averaging more than 4 words.

Every word comes back

Every word the rule covers comes back.

heard once
0 words 0%
twice
511 words 58%
3 to 5 times
212 words 24%
6 to 10 times
62 words 7%
11 times or more
95 words 11%

Each taught form must be heard again on at least one later card, in a new sentence. 880 forms are held to that rule and all of them return. The last 30 vocabulary cards are exempt, because no later cards are left to bring them back without breaking the one-new-thing rule. The bars and the median cover those 880 forms only, not the exempt ones. A form is heard 2 times in the median; 76% of the required returns come more than 30 cards after the form is taught, spaced rather than straight after, and 77% come back within 200 cards. No form is the new word of two cards in the same meaning, and every new form appears in its own card's sentence. Repeating a word on a schedule is the review system's job; the deck's job is a second voice and context. Which voice reads each card isn't part of the published deck, so voice variety isn't measured here.

Grammar spacing

No grammar walls.

52 grammar cards explain patterns, the first at card 21, with a median of 5 cards between one and the next. The rule: never two in a row, and at most 5 in any 20 cards. No grammar card follows another directly, and the busiest 20 cards hold 5.

Audio, pictures and repeats

Every card has audio and a picture, and no sentence repeats.

1,035 of 1,035 cards have audio (1,035 files in all) and 1,035 have a picture. Two cards with the same sentence would be the same card twice, so sentences that differ only in capitals, accents or punctuation count as one: no sentence appears on two cards.

The other decks, measured the same way

Measured 2026-10-29 09:54 UTC.

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