Are flash cards a necessary evil? (Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies) Language Learning Forum

Are flash cards a necessary evil?
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Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies

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s_allard
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5365 days ago
2704 posts - 5425 votes

Speaks: French*, English, Spanish
Studies: Polish

Message 49 of 83

31 January 2011 at 8:56pm | IP Logged

s_allard wrote:

Andrew C wrote:

s_allard wrote:

It's hard for me to see how people can be against flashcards,

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 ;).

I'm always astonished that people can make grand statements about what other people should or should not do. The issue isn't whether people love or hate flashcards. It's whether flashcards work for you or not. Alas, I think, as happens so often here at HTLAL, we probably don't agree on what flashcards are.

I'm concentrating on Spanish right now and I use two kinds of paper-based cards. First, a home-made set where I write down interesting phrases with or without translation on 10 X 7 cm pieces of paper. I concentrate on things that I find difficult or unusual. Just this morning, I wrote down something I heard on the radio:

Es inadmisible que estos hechos se vengan produciendo.

This is something that I want to remember because it contains a number of interesting structures.

I also recently bought a pre-production set of 420 cards of a commercial product called Essential Spanish 1. These 420 cards are divided into 12 grammatical or lexical themes. Each card has a dialogue or phrase in Spanish on the front and translation into French and English on the back.

Right now I'm looking at two cards. One card has the following dialogue:

--Es muy tarde. Tenemos que marcharnos.
--¿Y cuándo nos vuelven a ver?

The translation on the back is:

--It's getting late. We have to leave.
-- And when will you come to see us again?

--Il se fait tard. Il faut qu'on parte.
--Et quand allez-vous revenir nous voir?

The second card has:

A los pocos segundos, el motor del misil se encendió.

Here is the translation on the back:

A few seconds later, the motor of the missile ignited.
Quelques secondes plus tard, le moteur du missile s'est mis en marche.

I really liked this second card because it illustrated a construction in Spanish that I find difficult to use: A los/las with a unit of time to mean ...later. My natural tendency is to translate from French with the adverb después.

I like these kinds of cards because I can focus on certain constructions without all the clutter of the notebooks that I use as well. When I go to a Spanish-language meetup, I'll take a few cards, such as these two, with me. Then I go about deliberately using the phrases or variations thereof in the course of the conversation. If necessary, I'll take them out of my pocket to refresh my memory. For example, recently I focused on this A los/las construction by using things such as A las pocas horas, À los pocos minutos, A los dos semanas, etc. all in context of sentences.

And when I'm about the leave the meetup, I'll throw in some variation of the contents of the first card, i.e. Bueno pues, se hace tarde. Tengo que irme. Or, if somebody else is leaving, I'll use: Oye y ¿cuándo nos vuelve a ver?

For me (and maybe for me only) this works wonders because I feel that my Spanish is progressing as I deliberately push myself to try something new or different.

What I see too often at the meetups that I participate in (English, French and Spanish) is a lot of people speaking mediocre language to other speakers of mediocre language. I guess it's better than nothing, but I do sometimes get the impression that most people are not really progressing. They're stuck in some sort of fossilized mode. The main problem is that people are not speaking idiomatically. Most of the time they are sort of translating from their native tongue and sounding awkward.

I make a point of carefully observing native speakers and also trying out trusted and idiomatic content from by flashcards. Native speakers inevitably react favourably when they hear something that is very appropriate. I don't claim to do this all the time, but I find that with the flashcards and all the other tools that I use, my repertoire of appropriate phrases is increasing by leaps and bounds.

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 50 of 83

31 January 2011 at 10:05pm | IP Logged

Not sure why you reposted your reply to my earlier post - but if it was to chase me up for a response here it is;

Firstly I don't think you should be so shocked that people are trying to tell other people how to learn. I think we should be allowed to say what we want. Many of us have made mistakes in the past and are trying to help other people avoid these mistakes.

Flashcards and vocabulary lists for me are one of the biggest mistakes I made when learning Arabic. I wish someone had told me the key to language learning is listening to natural language, not getting bogged down with stupid cards.

I see the flashcards you are using are generally sentences. In theory these should be better than single words, but I find sentence flashcards depressing for some reason. I think I object to the fact that they suggest you have to say it such and such a way, whereas in reality there are probably many ways to say it. Also I don't like the fact that the sentences learned from a flashcard feel fake when I say them.

I have just been on holiday to Spain and I took with me 8 recorded conversations with transcript and Google parallel text translation, which I listened too many times over. I learned tons of vocab, good pronunciation, some grammar and improved my listening skills. All without the need for fiddly flashcards. This is the way I like to learn now. I will never go back to flashcards and if I can persuade just one person not to use flashcards, I'll be a very happy person.

Edited by Andrew C on 31 January 2011 at 10:08pm
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leosmith
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6485 days ago
2365 posts - 3804 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Tagalog

Message 51 of 83

01 February 2011 at 1:19am | IP Logged

Andrew C wrote:

I don't think you should be so shocked that people are trying to tell other people how to
learn.

It's wonderful to me that you don't think we should be so shocked that people are trying to tell other people how to
learn.
1 person has voted this message useful

Ernest
Newbie
United States
Joined 5002 days ago
1 posts - 2 votes
Studies: English

Message 52 of 83

01 February 2011 at 4:18am | IP Logged

I used to use flash card when first learning my target language but stopped because I found them to be very inefficient.

1. Using flash cards are okay when you are a beginner but once you begin to learn 5,000 plus words, you are not going to have the time to review all of those cards and then learn new words. It is much easier and faster to get a word list and scan it (which can be done quickly) than to use flash cards.

2. Flash cards get lost, drinks may accidentally spill on them, etc.

3. It is tedious to make flash cards.

The method I found to work best for me is to get frequency dictionaries. It is easy to review since you can quickly scan the page, dictionaries are more durable and you don't have to spend time making flash cards. It has worked very well for me.
2 persons have 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 53 of 83

01 February 2011 at 5:05am | IP Logged

Actually, I didn't intend to repost my response to Andrew C's post. I wish I could delete it. I'm not sure how it got there. But since it provoked an interesting answer, I'll leave it there.

As I stated earlier, the issue here isn't where flash cards or bad or good but really if they work for you or not. I like flash cards because they work for me. I don't go around trying to convert the world to flash cards. To me they're are tool in my tool box in which I have a bunch of things. I have tons of recordings, dual-language texts, dictionaries, word lists, videos, notebooks, you name it, I've got it. Some tools work better for me than others. I rave about a certain tool in Spanish because it really worked for me. But other people don't see things the same way. I don't use electronic flash cards because I find them cumbersome and I like to write on my cards. As I've tried to show, I use the cards in a certain way, with great results FOR ME. If they don't work for you, please do yourself a favour and don't use them.
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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 54 of 83

01 February 2011 at 7:40am | IP Logged

leosmith wrote:

Andrew C wrote:

I don't think you should be so shocked that people are trying to tell other people how to
learn.

It's wonderful to me that you don't think we should be so shocked that people are trying to tell other people how to
learn.

I am shocked to know that you are shocked because you think that other people wouldn't be shocked because that people are trying to tell other people how to learn.

2 persons have voted this message useful

William Camden
Hexaglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 6207 days ago
1936 posts - 2333 votes

Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French

Message 55 of 83

01 February 2011 at 12:30pm | IP Logged

I get a small morale boost when a word I have learned actually occurs independently. When I took my final German examination in school, there was not a German word in the German to English translation required that I did not know. While part of the credit for this belonged to extensive work learning words from dictionaries, I also first encountered much of the vocabulary from using Vis-Ed flashcards for German.
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 56 of 83

01 February 2011 at 12:55pm | IP Logged

William Camden wrote:

While part of the credit for this belonged to extensive work learning words from dictionaries

May I ask whether by this you mean looking up words you've read in a text or heard somewhere, or (gulp!)if you learn words just by reading a dictionary? (something I could never imagine doing).

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