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Are flash cards a necessary evil? | ||
Tags: Flash cards | Usefulness | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 73 of 83 04 February 2011 at 5:53am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Everybody is entitled to an opinion, of course. That's not the issue. The issue is that a fair number of people, but obviously not everybody, seem to like flashcards. As I said earlier, part of the problem seems to be in the definition of flashcards. To define flashcards as "something which breaks up a language into artificial segments" certainly puts an end to any discussion. As for reading and listening to natural language, is there anybody against that? Not here at HTLAL. For those of us who do find flashcards useful, I think the value lies in the fact that they allow us to isolate certain chunks and items to focus on. I like to concentrate on the difficulties in the target language. I don't put easy things on flashcards. As I illustrated in earlier posts, when I see or hear something I like and that I want to use, I write it down in a notebook or on a flashcard. I would be willing to bet that 90% of people here at HTLAL have a notebook of some sort. Of course, I imagine there are some people who can read an entire book in the target language and never take a note because they have a photographic memory. That's not my case. If I see something intriguing and useful, I have to write it down or I'll forget it. Contrary to what has been said, using flashcards as a mnemonic device has made my speaking certainly more fluent and above all idiomatic. Maybe my brain is getting old, but I find that the cards prod me to use things that I might forget. Every day I make a point of trying to use something new. So I choose a few cards or I make some on the spot and keep them handy. Just a few days ago I used the idiom "por doquier" in a perfectly proper answer to a question and really impressed a friend who teaches Spanish at a local university. The only reason I remembered this is because I had written it down after seeing it. There seems to be this weird notion that you use flashcards by reading from them in the course of the conversation, as if one can't talk without having the flashcard present. Sort of like "Hold on, I have to see what the flashcard says." This is silly. But much is this discussion is rather pointless anyways. Those of us who like flashcards, electronic or paper, know their utility. Those who don't like them have other ways of learning. Everybody is happy. As an aside, one reason I'll go so far as to suggest more people should give thought to using flashcards is that when I attend language meetups in French, English or Spanish I find that many people just sort of bumble along and don't really make much progress because they are not making a determined effort to apply what they have studied. There's nothing wrong with socializing and chatting for a couple of hours, but I personally want to come away feeling that I've made some incremental progress in my Spanish. The only way I can do that is by deliberately trying out new things. Right now I'm working on the imperfect subjunctive. Of course, it so happens that I usually have on me a card or two with some simple examples of the imperfect subjunctive. It doesn't always work, mind you. But there will always be a next time. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6610 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 74 of 83 04 February 2011 at 7:53am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I agree with you. This is part of the solution focused approach. Techniques work around this idea, but in a explicit way. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Andrew C Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom naturalarabic.com Joined 5125 days ago 205 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 75 of 83 04 February 2011 at 11:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well yes maybe we have been talking at cross purposes to some extent. I think "prompt cards" are OK - something to help you kick start a conversation or remember a speech, for example.
Well I thought it might be because I was getting old that I went off flashcards ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5343 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 76 of 83 05 February 2011 at 1:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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A book is essentially a large number of sentence flashcards with irregular review times (or no reviews), and a background context that makes those individual sentence flashcards slightly easier to know (or guess).
I like to use books as well, but using a book "flashcard" in the earlier stages I think might be somewhat inefficient. Edited by Sandman on 05 February 2011 at 2:01am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kmart Senior Member Australia Joined 6059 days ago 194 posts - 400 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 77 of 83 05 February 2011 at 5:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||
That doesn't mean that all opinions are equally useful, or even valid. It's my opinion that the Earth is flat and the Moon is composed of green cheese. ;-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4844 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 78 of 83 18 June 2011 at 2:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I fully understand those who reject flashcards, because I myself was an abuser when I first studied Ancient Greek in university. I put absolutely everything in the textbook on cards, and memorized them all. I did it because it is actually quite easy, although time-consuming. But could I understand full sentences? Unfortunately not, because I didn't put much time into more difficult tasks like reading and writing.
That is the real pit-fall of flashcards, if you don't use them right. You feel like you're making progress because you "know" x number of words. But if you don't practice the words in other contexts of speaking, reading, hearing and writing, then you don't really know them usefully. Now that I have just begun learning French with my son, I wasn't sure about using flash cards. However, we have found them to be useful, because we can quiz each other as we go for a walk. I also get his younger brother to quiz him sometimes. Hopefully he's picking up a bit of the language that way. But when we go through the cards, I try to make up sentences for each word as we go. It actually helps us remember them better. To avoid falling into my previous addiction, I am careful to make sure we spend more time on reading and listening to the dialogues than on going through the flashcards. And I am careful that we use all of the words and sentences we learn. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6610 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 79 of 83 18 June 2011 at 5:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Readers and paralell texts might be useful in this early stages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| laika3 Newbie United States Joined 4960 days ago 2 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swahili | Message 80 of 83 19 June 2011 at 5:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I read this thread yesterday and as I was flipping through my flash cards last night, I paid particular attention to how I use them as I find flash cards useful at certain stages of language learning.
I realized that I (unintentionally) use flash cards in a way that some of you may find interesting. I am just starting a new language at the moment, and I have cards of the English word on one side and the foreign language's word on the other. I will first go from the foreign side to the English side, and then reverse it. Pretty much precisely what most agree is the most ineffective way of using flash cards. But what I noticed last night is that when I see a word, I pronounce it in my head and my brain forms a "picture" of it. For nouns, the picture is usually simple. For verbs, it is a picture of somebody performing that verb's action, or recalling an experience of my own where that verb was salient. Adjectives were mostly recalling my own experience. For example, if you tell me the word "tree" in English with no particular context, I will immediately think of a particular tree in my back yard that I used to climb every day as a child. The interesting part here is how it relates to flash cards. I *don't* translate from English to the foreign language directly. I found myself "translating" from the foreign language to the picture to English, and vice versa. I will read the foreign language and as I read the word, the most immediate association for me is the picture. Then, from the picture I subconsciously think "What English word corresponds to this picture?", at which point the foreign language is completely irrelevant. And that is how I come up with the English translation of the foreign word. This is a rather drawn out explanation of something that happens in milliseconds, but I found it fascinating that I have been doing this for years and not realizing it. Perhaps this is why flash cards work for some and not others? They certainly do work for me, and maybe it's because I am not associating a foreign word with an English equivalent, but with an "idea" of what the word is. This also works for words that have no direct equivalent. In Russian, for example, my picture of "открыть" is a person opening a window once. My picture of "открывать" is a person opening a window multiple times. Of course this isn't perfectly exact, but I think it does the job. Does anybody else do this? Edit: spelling Edited by laika3 on 19 June 2011 at 5:50pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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