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Flash card poll | ||
Tags: Poll | Flash cards | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7207 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 1 of 28 13 November 2014 at 5:32am | IP Logged |
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Do you use flashcards?
If not, why? If so, do you every wonder whether they help or not? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Xenops Senior Member United States thexenops.deviantart Joined 3827 days ago 112 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 2 of 28 13 November 2014 at 7:03am | IP Logged |
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Originally I found flashcards to be very boring. Then I heard about Gabriel Wynder's method (fluent-forever.com), where you incorporate sounds and pictures onto Anki, and I found these effective. The most effective part is remembering pronunciation. For example, Spanish and Italian share a lot of words, but of course they sound different. The constant reinforcement of how an Italian word should (i.e. center, either "sentro" for Spanish or "chentro" for Italian), I find helpful.
I also found the flashcards useful for rare languages. For example, I have very few resources for Hawaiian. I do have an audio list of vocabulary and phrases, so what I have been doing is picking out the phrases with Audicity and then putting them into flashcards. lately I have not done much with Anki because my six-year-old computer (!) is finally dying, and I'm waiting for my new one in the mail. :) Then I plan to use Anki seriously again. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5310 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 3 of 28 13 November 2014 at 8:40am | IP Logged |
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I use flashcards because I've had great results.
I crammed 8000 words within the first 4 months of learning German, which allowed me to understand 96.x% of the words in Yahoo news articles. That meant I could use almost any native material for further learning, which was of course more enjoyable than using TY or children's material. I don't always cram like that, though. I learned Spanish after French, so vocabulary was relatively easy. But typing in answers and rushing through it trained me to produce Spanish words spontaneously. As a result, I was able to speak and text-chat reasonably fluently right from the first time, even without deliberate writing or speaking practice. On the other hand, I didn't use flashcards for the first half of my French journey, and that was okay, too. I'd just read a word list every now and then. But my spelling was all over the place. And what fixed it, in the end, was answering flashcards by typing. 300 days into learning Spanish and I know 98.x% of the words in Da Vinci Code, Lord of the Rings, etc. (actual word count, not estimate). No, I don't wonder whether flashcards help. I know they do! - Edited by smallwhite on 13 November 2014 at 8:41am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4255 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 4 of 28 13 November 2014 at 8:54am | IP Logged |
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I only recently managed to get in the habit of using flashcards because I got an Android phone and downloaded AnkiDroid. They never got done on my PC.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4101 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 5 of 28 13 November 2014 at 9:05am | IP Logged |
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I used to enter every single word I learnt from Assimil into a deck and study those, along with every word from a "word of the day" database, and a couple of words per week from a Breton "these are the words you need to read the language" type of list. Then I created another deck of just things like mutations, irregular plurals and compounded prepositional pronouns. The workload, just keeping up with these cards, got really out of hand, it was boring, and for the most part I found that most words were words I could only remember when doing flashcards, and only if they occurred relatively close to other words I'd practised them with. So, I stopped doing flashcards.
I have since picked them back up, though. Now I do sentences with words left out. I mostly copy them from native sources, when I come across a word or a grammar point that I want to get better at, or an expression that would be very useful to remember. It seems to be working a lot better. When I start another language, though, I'm going to go for the Subs2SRS version that emk has been showing lately. That looks even better, but alas isn't something I can implement right now (French level doesn't need it, Breton dubs/subs being kind of a small market so it's a lot of work) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5209 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 28 13 November 2014 at 10:22am | IP Logged |
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When I first heard about Anki I started using it a lot, doing a combination of a pre-made "Intermediate French" deck and a personal deck with cards with one word on each side. Neither are, of course, the best way to use them, but they did help a bit. Then I read an anti-flashcards article which, while quite simplistic and contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, I saw the point of it and decided to give up the cards.
A year or two later I got into them again, mostly from seeing people's positive results with them on this forum and perhaps having a more balanced perspective, and using them "properly" (sentence cards with highlighted words or cloze deletions, etc.), and I'm quite convinced that they helped me boost my active skills and get my French out of the "intermediate plateau" that I was stuck in from focusing only on conversation and input. So now I'm a flashcard convert again and I use them for all languages. They're certainly not the centrepiece of my studies, just an accessory to help retain what I'm learning a little better and keep active skills moving along. And for that purpose they're worth the 10 minutes or so per day, especially now that I have a smartphone so can study them anywhere. I still miss Anki v1. I found its interval settings really effective straight out of the box; I've tried tweaking the settings in version 2 but can't get them quite right. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 7 of 28 13 November 2014 at 10:44am | IP Logged |
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I voted yes, but as of now I don't really use flash cards.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5102 days ago 411 posts - 639 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German | Message 8 of 28 13 November 2014 at 10:53am | IP Logged |
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I find them to be mind numbingly boring so I can't use them consistently.
4 persons have voted this message useful |
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