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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 |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 17 of 83 16 January 2011 at 12:48am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
My view is that most organised classes throw too much vocabulary at a learner in too short a space of time. In that sort of circumstance, some kind of cramming technique is definitely useful -- a necessary evil, perhaps.
I think must people are the same. But I'm not sure it is a true advantage. Seeing the word written definitely makes it easier to explicitly memorise the word, but truly learning the word - internalising it - is a different matter. The circumstances that leave you relying on a large store of memorised words can sometimes discourage actual learning -- the pacing of tasks can be too slow, in which case the brain learns that memorisation is "good enough"; otherwise, the brain can just be too busy juggling all the individual memorised items to really learn them and the tasks don't use each individual item enough to ever be truly learned. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6485 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 18 of 83 16 January 2011 at 7:40am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
How is that evil?
Out of context; boring; consume the time that could be spent actually "using" L2.
Yes, but most of what's bad about flashcards is bad about wordlists, imo.
Me too. When my vocabulary is limited in a language, I don't get much interference from other newly learned words. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6884 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 19 of 83 16 January 2011 at 2:48pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Confession: I love making and using flashcards. I look forward to my Anki reviews every day. It makes studying fun and addictive for me, like a video game, but minus the guilty conscience that comes from using time unproductively. It's a video game that you can pat yourself on the back for having studied so hard after playing.
Of course, I say 'productive', but I don't think that flashcards are automatically productive in and of themselves. You have to use them wisely in order to make it worth the other potential beneficial activities (talking to a native speaker, enjoying target language media, etc.) which you're sacrificing during the time it takes to make and review the cards. I believe that one way to get the most out of your flashcards is to be picky and only enter the words you feel personally motivated to learn. Amassing vocabulary you don't particularly care about (for example, 'every word I didn't understand in this book' or '---'s Intermediate Japanese Word List') and forcing repeated exposure to them out of a feeling that it's the right thing to do strikes me as a bit masochistic, especially when natural exposure over time will eventually take care of these words (and give you a more accurate sense of their nuances and frequency of usage than flash cards will to boot). I think flashcards are worth their time when you limit them to words that made you think, 'I really want to learn/remember this word!' 'I can really use this!' 'I'd always wondered how to say that!' etc. Personally, I wouldn't consider using someone's premade flashcard deck or drilling every unknown word I come across a much better use of my time than turning to a random page in the dictionary and drilling every word listed there. I think that with flash cards, it's easy to fall into the trap of using them as your sole means of acquiring new vocab, when really they shine as a supplemental tool. When you limit them to personally interesting words/phrases, instead of huge decks containing every unknown word you've ever encountered that take a huge 2-hour chunk out of your day to go through, it becomes more of a '10 minutes here, 5 minutes there' kind of thing, the same way some people compulsively play Minesweeper or check their email throughout the day. When you take away the mental and time-related burden away from flash cards, it becomes not so much a question of 'Did they work or did they not work?' and more like one of those 'Well, I enjoy it and am not losing anything by it, so any benefit it provides toward reaching my goal is an added bonus' kind of things. Finally, I remember doviende stating somewhere that his rule of thumb is to use Anki to review words he doesn't want to forget, rather than to teach himself new words. This approach to flashcards strikes me as one possible way to fly confidently through reviews and avoid over-relying on them for vocabulary acquisition. The moral: If flashcards are not made to be as fun, easy, and relevant to your personal needs as possible, they might not be worth your time (or worse yet, might be torturous). As Khatzumoto says, the SRS should be your slave, and not the other way around. Edited by Lucky Charms on 16 January 2011 at 2:55pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5343 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 21 of 83 17 January 2011 at 12:25pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I love SRS. And I love it mainly because I hate it.
I think that right around 30-35 minutes minimum per day is about perfect. At least for me that seems to be where the "Skip a Day Time Penalty" is high enough that I will absolutely force myself to study every day, regardless of whether I'm in the mood or have other things to do. The thought of going for over an hour the next day is too painful to consider. Even better than the SRS method itself is the consistency it forces. I can't even imagine the idea of going a week without studying. To do that would feel like giving up on the language altogether due to the massive time hole it would create, and thus an impossible choice. There may be other ways to force yourself into a daily studying "trap" like the SRS, but I don't know if they'd work as well, at least for self-studying. As a natural procrastinator and random activity addict it's kept me completely on track for over a year now. Onward, every day, or death! Edit: In retrospect my post didn't necessarily deal with "flashcards" specifically, but more of an endorsement of organized and forced spaced repetition in general. I try to apply spaced repetition, using Anki as the platform, but for many different things such as audio clips, grammar lessons, translation practice, and vocabulary from many different sources. Basically anything that I'll ever want to review in any context. Edited by Sandman on 19 January 2011 at 12:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 22 of 83 17 January 2011 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I like my flashcards, but I somehow get the impression in this debate that people use flashcards in different ways.
Basically, I put an interesting idiom or phrase on a card with an example or two. Sometimes I put something on the back but not always. I also have wordlists and notebooks. Actually, I think most people have something similar. What I like about flashcards is that I can choose a certain number of expressions, let's say 5, to work on for the day. I put them in my pocket and I look at them from time to time whenever I have a minute. Then I make a point of using each expression at least 5 times during the day. I even write notes on the cards or on the back if I hear something interesting. This way I don't have to carry around my primary notebook with over 600 entries. The thought of losing that notebook scares me to death. When I go to language meetups, I take some cards with me. The cards allow me to zoom in on particular items that I can pick out of larger lists. I don't consider them a method. They are just a memory tool for me. It's hard for me to see how people can be against flashcards, but, as I always say, if something doesn't work for you, don't do it. 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 24 of 83 17 January 2011 at 4:32pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
My thoughts on why everyone should avoid flashcards like the plague: - the natural way to learn a language is through listening to natural sentences in context and with some way of understanding the meaning. Flashcards are generally soundless and context-less and the only way to recall the meaning is through a translation (translation is OK to start with, but afterwards you should be able to recall the meaning from context) or dodgy synonym. - flashcards break up the language. Real language is a flow, but flashcards are a stop-start affair. - with flashcards you are likely to be learning a lot of unnecessary vocabulary. - I think it is too much effort to think "do I want to remember this?" before making a flashcard. Just listen/read and you'll remember what you want to. I know people like flashcards - I used to love them. But I can tell you if I was starting another language from scratch now - even a "difficult" one such as Chinese, I would never never never use flashcards. But I guess peole will still use them. We all have to make our own mistakes ;). 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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