You studied the 9 pilot grammar cards and said they didn't teach anything. This is the redesign — built around one simple idea: you can't memorize a rule statement into being able to use the rule. You only get there by practicing it, one sentence at a time.
The 9 pilot cards showed you a rule, like "ber- + noun = have," as the card's title — then some example sentences underneath. The problem: the card's front already contained the answer. There was nothing to figure out, nothing to recall, nothing to get wrong. Grading a card like that measures nothing, because you can't fail it.
Here's the deeper reason that design doesn't work, backed by how language actually gets learned: knowing a grammar rule (as a sentence you could recite) and being able to use that rule in a real sentence are two completely different skills. You get the second one only by doing it over and over — applying the rule to new words, in new sentences — not by re-reading the rule itself on a repeating schedule. Every serious language app that teaches grammar (Bunpro being the closest match to what we're building) has landed on the same split: a rich "study page" you can read anytime, completely separate from short, one-sentence-at-a-time practice drills that actually get graded.
So this redesign draws that same line: one un-graded rule page (read it, refer back to it) feeding a handful of small, graded sentence drills — each one asking you to produce the correct form of a word in one specific sentence.
Stuck on a card? Tapping "hint" walks up this ladder — each tap gives one more clue, never the full answer.
Each grammar rule (like "ber- verbs") becomes one rule page — the write-up you just saw in the reveal above: the rule, how it's formed, examples, the common mistake, related rules. You never get graded on the rule page itself; it's a reference, always available.
Under that rule sit 3 to 5 small sentence cards — the fill-in-the-blank cards, like "Dia ⟦kerja⟧ di bank." Each one is graded completely on its own schedule (Again / Hard / Good / Easy), same as your vocabulary cards today. "Good" means you produced the right form of the word for that specific sentence — not that you can recite the rule.
Option A (recommended) — two levels: the rule page, and 3-5 sentence cards under it. Simple, matches how the app already handles cards, and nothing new to build beyond the rule page itself.
Option C — three levels: add a "family" level above the rule — e.g. group all 11 "ber-" rules under one "ber- family" page, the way word families already work. Gives you a bigger-picture curriculum view, but it's an untested shape and costs extra build time for a benefit we can get another way (a simple "related rules" list, already in the design).
Pocket only (recommended): store it in the same flexible per-card storage area every other archetype already uses. Zero new database structure, ships faster, easy to change later.
Real column: gives the database a hard guarantee the identifier always matches something in the master rule list (a foreign key). Slightly safer against typos in the generation pipeline, but it's the one piece of actual database surgery in this whole plan.
Per-profile opt-in (recommended): matches how the alphabet/script track already works. When we checked this design against two different learner personas (a retiree and a kid), both were an awkward fit for grammar-rule drilling — not a hard "no," just against the grain of how they naturally study. Opt-in respects that.
Default-on: simpler onboarding, one less setting to explain — but risks putting a dense, adult-facing study format in front of learners it doesn't suit.
Reveal-only now, typed later (recommended): you read the sentence, think of the answer, tap to reveal, then grade yourself honestly. Simple to build, no risk of correct answers being marked wrong over spelling/typo issues. Typing can be added as an option later.
Typed from day one: stronger practice (you have to actually produce the word, not just recognize it) but needs careful handling of near-misses, capitalization, and Indonesian's optional spelling variants before it's fair to grade automatically.
Yes. We paper-checked this whole design against Japanese (a very different grammar system — particles and verb conjugation instead of prefixes) before committing to it. It holds with zero database surgery: the same per-language override mechanism the app already uses for other content covers everything Japanese needs — free-text formation patterns instead of "ber- + base," and an optional field for how a word is read aloud (for kana/kanji). The Indonesian topic map you saw above is content, not part of the underlying design — a different language just gets its own topic map plugged into the same machinery.
Right now the Script track has 31 units built (the 26 letters + 5 letter-pairs, one of which — "NK" — looks questionable and needs a second look), but it's missing some sounds (the letter E actually makes two different sounds), the diphthongs (ai/au/oi), and stress rules — and the on-screen renderer isn't finished either.
The same four-question design framework used here re-applies directly. The main differences: what you're practicing is recognizing/hearing a letter, not filling in a blank in a sentence; and since audio is central to letters, the "autoplay audio" default flips back to on (the opposite of grammar cards).
This starts once your 4 decisions above are answered.