Last updated 12 October 2026
Tarjetas — Vladyslav Pysarenko — urunokun@gmail.com
Write to that address about anything here. It is one person, so an answer may take a few days; reports made from inside the app are handled faster and separately — see Reporting somebody below.
There is no account, no password and no email address in Tarjetas. That removes most of what a support page usually exists for, and it creates one problem of its own, which is the first entry below. Everything else is a matter of knowing where a button is.
Your code is on the Settings tab. It is eight characters, it is drawn once when the app first opens, and it is what a friend types to reach you. It is not a username: there is no directory, no search and no way to look somebody up by name.
A code cannot be restored by anybody. Not by the developer, and not by the server. There is no password to reset and no email address to send a link to, so the only thing that carries your code to another phone is your phone's own backup — Android's auto-backup to your Google account, or iCloud to your Apple account. Both are on by default and both include this app.
If you wipe a phone with backup turned off, or move between Android and iOS — neither backup can be read by the other — the app opens as a new user with a new code. Your friends will need the new one, and classes you had joined will need joining again with their codes. Nobody can hand back the old code, and asking will not change that. It is worth checking your backup setting before replacing a phone rather than after.
Move before you wipe. While the old phone still works, you can move everything to the new one instead, backup or none, and between Android and iOS too — whether you teach, learn or both:
Everything comes across except your words: your code, name and avatar, your settings, the classes you teach with their students, lessons, quizzes and key, the class you are in with your homework — answers not yet handed in too — and the classes you have left and kept, your friends, your blocks and your drill progress. For the words, use Import or export words on the Dictionary tab; the progress waits for them and applies once they are in. The old phone lets go of the account but keeps its words and progress. The way in is only offered on a phone with no class, friend, joined class or linked device of its own, because moving an account in replaces the one the phone had. Show the code to nobody: for its hour, it hands your account to whoever types it.
From version 1.7 your account can be on more than one device at once: a phone and a tablet, say, or a phone and a browser. Every one of them holds the account in full, nobody is signed out, and none is the main one, so losing one strands none of the others.
The other device arrives a copy of the first: everything a move carries, and your words too, with their groups. A word it already had, spelt the same but different in some other way, is asked about, as with an imported file. Typing a code is only offered on a device with no class, friend, joined class or linked device of its own, because the account it takes replaces the one it had. Show the code to nobody: for its hour, it hands your account to whoever types it. An account can be on ten devices at most.
Each device then lists the others at the top of its Friends tab, by kind and model — "iPad", "Pixel 7", a browser — never by the name you gave it. What the server keeps is the same on all of them: your code, your friends, your classes and your blocks, and a new name or avatar set on one reaches the rest. Your words and your drill progress are each device's own, and nothing copies them by itself; a device's row does. One button sends it this device's words, the next takes the words it sent you, with the number waiting, and the last unlinks it after asking. Words sent wait on the server until the other device takes them, or until either is unlinked.
A device unlinked, from itself or from another, lets go of the account at its next sync and keeps its words and progress, as an old phone does after a move. While another device holds your account, the bin on the Settings tab unlinks only the device it is pressed on, and says so; the account itself is deleted from the last device holding it.
The same app runs in a web browser at https://tarjetas.elzianor.com, with nothing to install: Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari, on a computer or a tablet. On a phone, the app itself is the better fit. It is the same server as the app's, so classes and friends work across the two: a teacher in a browser and students on phones are one class.
A browser is one more device. Opened on its own, it gets a code of its own, the same way a phone does. To have your phone's account in the browser as well, link it, as above: the chain on the Friends tab of each. To take the account there and off the phone, move it: the amber phone on the phone, the green one in the browser.
Everything is kept in that browser, and nowhere else — not in a phone's backup, and not on your other computers. Clearing the browser's data for the site loses it, code included, just as wiping a phone with no backup does, and so does closing a private window you used it in. So use an ordinary window, and save a backup now and then. One tab at a time: a second tab says the app is open elsewhere, and opens by itself once the first is closed.
A backup is one file holding all of it: your words, progress, settings and account. Backup on the Settings tab saves one, wherever you choose, and applies it after the browser's data has been cleared. To go on in another browser or on a phone, link or move the account instead, as above: applied there, a backup would leave two devices in one device's place. Whoever has the file has your account, so keep it to yourself. Applying one replaces what is in the browser and opens the app again over the backup; it is offered only while this browser's own account holds no class, friend or joined class, as moving an account in is.
It can be installed as an app, with its own icon and window: Install in the address bar or menu of Chrome and Edge, Add to Home screen in Chrome on Android, Add to Home Screen from the share button in Safari on an iPhone or iPad, and Add to Dock in Safari on a Mac. It is still the same app and the same storage. On an iPhone or iPad it is also what keeps Safari from clearing that storage after some days without a visit.
It opens with no connection, too, once it has been opened with one: the browser keeps the app's files. Learn, Dictionary and Settings then work offline, as they do on a phone. Classes and friends wait for the connection, and so do the microphone in most browsers and the first picture read, which fetches the reader.
What differs from the app. The microphone works in Chrome, Edge and Safari, which ask for it the first time you press it; Firefox has no speech recognition, so it shows no microphone, and neither does a computer with no microphone plugged in. Some browsers built like Chrome, Vivaldi and Brave among them, offer a microphone with nothing behind it: the first press strikes it through and says so. The speak button needs a Spanish voice. Chrome and Edge bring their own; other browsers use the computer's, and a computer set up in English often has none. Then the speaker shows struck through, and pressing it says how to add one. On Windows the new voice can need a restart of the computer before it appears. Add many words picks a picture through the browser's file chooser, and on a tablet the camera button opens its camera; the first picture fetches the reader, a few megabytes, once. Exported words arrive as a download in Firefox and Safari, where Chrome and Edge ask where to save them. A new version arrives by itself the next time the page loads.
Your dictionary and your drill progress are on your device and are never kept on any server. They pass through one sealed when you move to a new phone or link another device, and words you send to one of your devices wait there until it takes them, as a dictionary sent to a friend does. They travel with your phone's backup, exactly as your code does, and they are removed by uninstalling the app.
A class you made stays on your device too. Deleting your account takes it off the server — nobody can join it any more — but the lessons you wrote stay where you wrote them.
From version 1.6, a phone restored from a backup takes each of your classes as the server has it, if the class changed after that backup was made: a lesson you added since, and the homework handed in for it, are not lost to last night's copy. This needs a backup made with 1.6 or later; one made before goes over the server's copy, as it always did.
From version 1.7, a round deals every word in the group you picked, once each, shuffled; the refill button starts a fresh one. The clock beside it deals only the words that are due: new ones, ones you missed, which are due at once, and ones whose wait is over. A word you know comes back after a day, then three, then a week, then three weeks, then two months, and a new word you know at first sight waits its day too.
Knowing a word before it is due does not move it up. If you drill the same short list repeatedly in one afternoon, the intervals will not grow, and that is deliberate — the schedule is built on the repetitions being spread out, and a word recalled a minute after you last saw it has not shown that it will be there tomorrow.
A grey clock means nothing in that group is due yet; a fresh round still deals all of it.
On the Dictionary tab, Add many words opens a page with a camera button and a picture button. Either one reads the lines of text off a photo or a screenshot and writes them onto the page for you to check; nothing goes into your dictionary until you add the lines yourself.
Where the reading is done is the Recognition setting on the Settings tab. On this phone, which is how the app arrives, reads on the device and needs no connection. In the cloud sends the photo to OCR.space, a reading service, and needs one; handwritten words come out better there. Choosing it asks first, and nothing changes unless you agree. While it is on, a small cloud sits in the corner of both buttons.
The cloud reads under a key that every copy of the app shares, on a free allowance that starts again each month. The part that reads handwriting runs out first: a line struck through the small cloud means it is not reading, and printed words still come back while handwriting barely does. Once the rest runs out too, reading in the cloud fails until the month turns: the button turns red, as it does for a photo with nothing on it. A key of your own has an allowance of its own: get one free at ocr.space/ocrapi/freekey and paste it into the OCR.space field on the Settings tab, which shows once Recognition is set to the cloud. Emptying the field goes back to the shared key, and setting Recognition back to the phone works whatever the allowance.
A teacher makes a class and reads out its code. A student types that code on the Classroom tab. Codes are eight characters and are typed the way they are read — the app folds the pairs that are easy to confuse, so an O typed for a zero still finds the class.
Set whether you are a teacher or a student on the Settings tab. You can be both at different times, and you can join your own class if you want to see what a student sees.
If a code is refused, the class is not on the server the app is pointed at. Check that you and the teacher are on the same server address — see below — and that the class has been published rather than only written.
Type a friend's code on the Friends tab. They have to accept before either of you sees the other's name. A request to a code that names nobody is refused, and that refusal is the whole of what any code can tell you: there is no way to find out whether a stranger exists.
A dictionary you send waits on the server until your friend takes it in. Sending again replaces what was waiting rather than stacking a second copy beside it. Words arrive filed under no topic — how you arrange your own list is yours and does not travel.
The app arrives already pointing at a server, so the Classroom and Friends tabs work without anybody being told an address. Being pointed at one is not being on it. The app writes you nowhere until you use one of those two tabs; drilling your own words never does.
The Learn, Dictionary and Settings tabs work with no connection at all, and always have — apart from reading a photo in the cloud, which needs one.
You can point the app at a different server — a teacher running one on the classroom's
own network, say — by typing its address on the Settings tab. The field accepts https://
anywhere, and plain http:// only for an address on your own network, which is where a
certificate cannot be had. An address that shows no tick is one the app will not use.
Offline mode, on the same tab, is a kind of do-not-disturb: the app stops all communication with the server — nothing synced, sent or fetched — until you turn it off. Reading a photo in the cloud still works while it is on; see Reading words off a photo.
The first time the app calls a server on your local network, iOS asks permission. If you refuse it, syncing fails in a way that looks exactly like a server being switched off.
Every place another person's words can reach you carries a flag: a friend's row, a student on a roster, the teacher of a class you have joined, a dictionary a friend has sent, and — while you are taking one in — any single word in it. Flagging opens one sheet, asks which of five reasons, and sends a copy of the text complained of along with it.
The word-level flag is the one worth knowing about. Reporting a whole dictionary sends every word in it with no indication of which one was the problem; reporting the word sends that word, with the parcel or the class named around it.
Reports are read within 72 hours, usually much sooner. What can follow ranges from a name or a note being taken down to an account being removed.
Blocking is on the same sheet and needs no report first, no reason, and no server round trip you have to wait for. It ends the friendship, empties anything waiting in either direction, takes the person off your rosters, and refuses everything they send afterwards. It survives reinstalling the app.
It is undone from the Settings tab. Blocking somebody is never disclosed to them.
Settings → Account → the bin. It asks first and shows what will go. While your account is on more than one device, the bin unlinks only the device it is pressed on — see Your account on several devices — and what follows applies on the last one.
It removes from the server your code and profile, every friendship and unanswered request, the classes you published with their student lists, every shared dictionary to or from you, and every block and report in either direction. It cannot be undone.
Your words, your progress and the classes on your own device are not touched — they were never on the server. What deletion cannot reach is a copy somebody else already has: a friend who has taken a dictionary you sent is holding those words on their own phone.
If you would rather ask a person to do it for you, write to the address at the top.
The app itself reads in English, French, German, Italian or Ukrainian, chosen on the Settings tab. That is the language the buttons and labels are in.
It is not a setting for what you are learning. Tarjetas teaches Spanish, and the other side of each card is whatever you type there — the translation column is your own words, in whatever language you write them, and the app does not need to be told which.
The full policy is at https://elzianor.github.io/Tarjetas/privacy.html, and the foot of the help page links to it. In short: no advertising, no analytics, no tracking, and nothing about you sold, shared or profiled. Two outside services can receive anything at all, and the policy describes both: Google's ML Kit, which reads photos in the Android app and reports to Google on its own work but never sends the picture; and OCR.space, which is sent a photo only if you set Recognition to the cloud, with nothing saying whose it is. In a browser, what you say aloud is turned into text by the browser's maker, as the policy describes under Using Tarjetas in a browser.
Write to the address at the top. What helps most: which phone, its OS version, what you did, and what happened instead of what you expected. A screenshot says most of that at once.