Flash card poll
Printed From: How-to-learn-any-language.com
Forum Name: General discussion
Forum Discription: Discussion about language learning for people who study languages on their own.
URL: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=39598
Printed Date: 21 July 2021 at 4:26pm
Posted By: luke
Subject: Flash card poll
Date Posted: 13 November 2014 at 5:32am
Do you use flashcards?
If not, why?
If so, do you every wonder whether they help or not?
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Replies:
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.
Xenops on 13 November 2014
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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!
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smallwhite on 13 November 2014
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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.
Henkkles on 13 November 2014
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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)
eyưimƶrk on 13 November 2014
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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.
garyb on 13 November 2014
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I voted yes, but as of now I don't really use flash cards.
Serpent on 13 November 2014
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I find them to be mind numbingly boring so I can't use them consistently.
Darklight1216 on 13 November 2014
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I use them a lot. Unlike most people here, I find SRSing quite entertaining, so itās not too much of an effort. I
currently spend around 40 minutes per day doing SRS, but bear in mind that I have two language both of
which I have started less than a year ago, so Iām still in the very intensive, word-list phase of vocabulary
acquisition (Iām trying to learn 12 words per day in each language).
Iām finding it very helpful, the speed at which Iām acquiring vocabulary is remarkable and I feel really good
about it. I do accompany Anki with reading, and once my level is high enough, speaking and listening, but I
found SRS to be extremely effective at getting words to stick. As my vocabulary grows larger and larger, I can
do more and more reading (and soon listening too) and therefore transition to a more ānaturalā way of
language learning. In a sense I use SRS to ābootstrapā my language learning.
chiara-sai on 13 November 2014
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I don't think I could otherwise "learn" 8k words in Mandarin (not counting thousands of words I've
guessed) in 5 months, studying less than 2 hours a day on average. It might not be the most
entertaining way to learn, but sure is time-effective. So I don't mind it as much, as I'm not learning
languages for fun, but to have fun knowing a language. Or, to reference a previous thread,
language learning isn't an end, but the means for me :)
Though recently, working with Subs2SRS-like cards to boost my listening comprehension (or
rather build it, as it was practically non-existent), can be quite enjoyable... when I'm doing well.
Understanding a sentence, as pronounced by a native speaker, at native speed, etc. gives more of
a sense of progression, than finally getting a word right. Which is not to say isolated vocabulary
study is any less useful.
Ezy Ryder on 13 November 2014
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I prefer wordlists, and I doubt that I could cram more words in a given time with Anki
Iversen on 13 November 2014
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I voted "yes" because I use Memrise a lot and have learned a lot of vocab that way this year.
I have tried to use Anki in the past though and can't get on with it at all. I much prefer the way Memrise checks whether an answr is right or wrong (ie. I can't cheat - I either type the word correctly or I don't) and how it automatically chooses when to show me the word again without me having to judge how difficult I've found it.
Anki just strikes me as grey, complicated and depressing, whereas Memrise is bright and colourful and just seems more fun overall :)
Radioclare on 13 November 2014
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As one of what will surely be a vast minority who doesn't use flashcards at all and never have used them, I have seen the angst some members, especially beginners, go through using (abusing) this method. By beginners, I'm talking about people who have yet to learn one second language to a high level.
SRS as a part of a well balanced diet for raw beginners (those who haven't learned a second language to a high level yet) is a good thing. When it gets out of control, instead of becoming a boost to memory it becomes the prime interaction with the language, along with a course. This can lead the raw beginner to look at the language as more of a "thing" to be studied instead of seeing the second language in all of its facets of communication.
If I need to, or want to, learn some particular vocabulary, I will write it down in a word list or annotate my pdf's and go over the terms for a few minutes (five at most) a day, always saying the words aloud several times (maybe this is a low tech version of srs). Reading extensively, and interacting with native-speakers and media tends to reinforce this for me. I would find 20 minute isolated daily srs reps to be tedious and it would not put me in a good frame of mind for learning- but that's just me. I'm not saying I won't ever use srs. Emk's subs2srs Spanish experiment shows the efficacy of this method to design and use one's own personal course in artificially boosting exposure to vocabulary and constructions (as an experienced learner). Since it's based on video that you like and enjoy, that would make all the difference for me in using it.
The traditional method: course - anki, more course - more anki- and cramming the most common 5,000 words has zero appeal to me. That being said, if I could incorporate a smidgen of srs into my learning, as a boost not as means unto itself, I would probably be more efficient.
iguanamon on 13 November 2014
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As I write this, I've just finished an hour of working with my Spanish tutor from Mexico and I am
looking at a stack of about 600 flashcards that I use from time to time. I also regularly use
AnkiAndroid on my smartphone.
In my opinion, whether we use wordlists or flashcards, it's basically the same idea: they are both tools
for memorizing words or phrases. Wordlists are more compact and can be organized into thematic
groups on paper. But the contents are in a rigid order. Flashcards are more flexible but require a lot of
manipulation.
As much as I like and appreciate Anki, I often prefer using paper flashcards because I can easily make
little piles of words or phrases for different purposes.
I wonder if people don't go overboard with flashcards, especially Anki. The idea of 5000 entries
boggles my mind. I'm with iguanamon on this. It's not the number of cards that counts, it's what you
do with them. What I like to do, as I did specifically this morning, is choose a small number of cards
whose content I deliberately use with my tutor. I lay the cards out in front of my computer and glance
at them in the course of the conversation. Very effective.
On the other hand, I don't see the point of plowing through thousands of cards. What I have done in
Anki is make small special-purpose decks. For example I have a deck just for the Spanish imperfect
subjunctive, a deck just for certain grammatical quirks and a deck for what I call the C2 threshold.
s_allard on 13 November 2014
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smallwhite wrote:
| 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. |
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Wow. That's impressive. Can you give some details? What was the structure of the cards? How many new cards did you see per day? How long per day did you study?
patrickwilken on 13 November 2014
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iguanamon wrote:
| I would find 20 minute isolated daily srs reps to be tedious and it would not put me in a good frame of mind for learning- but that's just me. I'm not saying I won't ever use srs. Emk's subs2srs Spanish experiment shows the efficacy of this method to design and use one's own personal course in artificially boosting exposure to vocabulary and constructions (as an experienced learner). Since it's based on video that you like and enjoy, that would make all the difference for me in using it. |
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My http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=39493&PN=1 - morning SRS reps are actually more of a game than anything else:
1. I see an image, and hear a few seconds of dialog.
2. I try to "hear" the dialog and understand it directly in Spanish without translation.
3. I show the back of the card, and look at either the Spanish or English subtitles if I nee them.
4. If I could more-or-less understand the card in Spanish, perhaps after replaying the audio a few times, I pass it.
5. I delete and suspend lots of cards, and choose the difficulty buttons semi-arbitrarily.
It's basically a listening-comprehension game. It's cool because the audio is fun, because I delete any cards which aren't fun, and because I'm making very perceptible progress towards my goal of watching the series without subtitles. I can just play an episode on the TV and hear how much I've learned.
iguanamon wrote:
| The traditional method: course - anki, more course - more anki- and cramming the most common 5,000 words has zero appeal to me. |
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Yeah, I know that vocabulary decks work really well for some people. But when I tried them, I found them absolutely agonizing. There are probably more effective techniques for vocab decks than what I was using. But I find that learning in context is effective and lots of fun, so why bother?
emk on 13 November 2014
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patrickwilken wrote:
smallwhite wrote:
| 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. |
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Wow. That's impressive. Can you give some details? What was the structure of the cards? How many new cards did you see per day? How long per day did you study? |
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Hi,
I probably studied 1 to 3 hours each day back then, but I did a lot of grammar, too.
I was using Excel instead of Anki, and each card took only 2 seconds to answer on average. That's 300 reps in 10 minutes.
Question: "man [noun]"
Answer: "der Mann"
The worksheet looks like this, 5 columns:
"der Mann" ... å .... "man" .... [formula] .... [answer goes here]
"rot" .........å½¢ .... "red" .... [formula] .... [answer goes here]
Column A is the answer and not visible.
Column B is the part of speech.
Column D Excel formula: =IF(A1=E1,"YES","_") which means: if cell(answer) = cell(question) then pop up the word "YES!"
When doing reps, I type "der Mann", hit return, type "rot", hit return.
My normal typing speed is around 85 words per minute which is above average.
I gather words from different sources, including both
- boring word lists, and
- words more meaningful to me, eg. from my textbook
At the beginning of each study session, I skim over my list, and pick the easiest words to start learning. <=this is probably the key.
Or, after entering a bunch of new words, I start learning them straightaway while they're still fresh.
Let's say I pick 10 words.
I answer them (20 seconds). Shuffle (Excel macro). Answer again (10 seconds). Shuffle again (Excel macro). ... ...
Regular skimming makes the list easier and easier.
If that's still not easy enough, I pick 10 words that start with "Kr-" or 10 that end with "-tion", etc.
Each card gets its own scheduling; multiplier 2. But I just review when I feel like it. Sometimes I just review adjectives, sometimes just country names.
Verbs are on a different sheet, and and I do conjugation practice with them.
Question: "to drink" + "participle"
Answer: "getrunkt"
and other variations.
The whole process was actually very easy. It was more "memorising words that I already sort of know" than forcing in new words.
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smallwhite on 13 November 2014
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smallwhite wrote:
Excel formula: if cell(answer) = cell(question) then "CORRECT!" else "WRONG!"
I gather words from different sources, including both
- boring word lists, and
- words more meaningful to me, eg. from my textbook
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Could you elaborate on the use of Excel, and the formula thereof?
Xenops on 13 November 2014
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SRS is the greatest tool I know of to learn individual facts. This is great for vocabulary and many other types of knowledge. I think it's underrated.
Nonetheless, it's important to realize which skills SRS can't train and perfect. SRS can teach you the rules of soccer--it cannot, however, teach you to play soccer. And so with language. Acquisition of vocabulary and the rules of grammar of a language are easily accomplished by SRS. Having a fluid conversation with an unpredictable partner (as most humans are) is one skill SRS is poorly geared to.
ScottScheule on 13 November 2014
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Honestly, no I don't use them much. I used them a lot in the first 3 months of Russian, up to 1000 words. Nowadays it is just an annoying task that has been sitting at the bottom of my to-do list for months. For me, the set-up process is much worse than the daily mindless answering of cards.
My latest SRS-like technique is to perform an Iversen-style wordlist in Excel, always moving the view one column to the right.
chokofingrz on 13 November 2014
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iguanamon wrote:
| That being said, if I could incorporate a smidgen of srs into my learning, as a boost not as means unto itself, I would probably be more efficient. |
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This is how I've come to use Anki. Over the years, I've gone back and forth on it, from one extreme (no flashcards at all) to the other (20+ new cards a day, goals of doing 10k+ cards within a year, etc.).
Now, I just use it give me a boost to the content (sentences) I'm exposed to, and I keep the decks small and the reps down with some simple rules like never failing a card and deleting it after I've seen it 6 times (because, after all, if it's important, it'll come up again).
sabotai on 14 November 2014
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Xenops wrote:
| Could you elaborate on the use of Excel, and the formula thereof? |
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Hey,
I amended my post.
smallwhite on 14 November 2014
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My experience is
1) Flash cards work when done regularly
2) They work best in conjunction with the "memory palace"
FuroraCeltica on 14 November 2014
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@Smallwhite: Thanks for your detailed description of your Excel-SRS system. I like the flexibility (with the scheduling) and the speed compared to a regular SRS.
Actually, one of the first SRS I used to study Japanese was the Japanese with Excel file (anybody remember the name of the file?). It was a Leitner-box implemented in Excel to learn the Kanji according to JLPT-level. Unfortunately, I can't find the file anymore (and a quick google search didn't yield any results or hints).
As I'm not well-versed with Excel, I'd love to see an example of your system in action. Would it be possible for you to post a sample Excel-file (or a video)?
Thuan on 26 April 2015
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Thuan wrote:
| As I'm not well-versed with Excel, I'd love to see an example of your system in action. |
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You'd need quite some Excel skills to use my file because it's not fully automatic like Anki. Bascially, if you can't build such a file from scratch yourself, you won't be able to use my file either.
You can use Anki instead. Deactivate words first, and then activate them when you decide to learn them.
smallwhite on 27 April 2015
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Personally it seemed the best way to learn a language is not to force yourself to memorize words & phrases
systematically (from A-Z). If you have relocated to a country where a language is spoken, I am sure whatever
approach you take would be helpful because you are in an environment that force you to speak and think in a
language in your daily activities.
When you are just taking classes in a foreign language, in your home country, flashcard alone will only give
you the basics. I find listening to the radio, watching TV programs online will improve your listening skills far
more than something passive that almost equals to rogue memorization of new words & phrases.
shk00design on 28 April 2015
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I'm one of those who goes back and forth on my use of flashcards. There was a time when I thought learning a language was essentially learning one or two thousand words. In fact, I learnt very little by doing that.
Now I use flashcards in different ways for different languages. For French I am slowly working through the 2500 most frequent words (I'm around 2300, but not adding any new ones for a while). For Hindi, I'm entering some of the odd words I don't know when I read. I will study these cards a bit, then read the passage again and hopefully the words will stick by being tied to a context. For Sanskrit I've started to enter the words and sentences as I learn them from Assimil le Sanskrit. I'm only learning these passively because it's less stressful and I never intend to speak Sanskrit, only read it. Oh, and the translation side of my Sanskrit cards are in French.
I usually do flashcards on Anki, and usually when I literally have nothing else to do (e.g. while waiting for someone, etc) or while half watching something on TV in English. For that reason, I don't use cards with audio. Some days I might clock up 2 hours (but it's not really 2 hours of work), other days 10 minutes or even nothing.
Jeffers on 28 April 2015
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I use flashcards (Anki) to try and help keep something in my memory.
Generally what I do is after a lesson from Assimil, Memorise, a podcast or whatever is I first write them out. I'll make up a sheet with the English sentence on one line and the French on the next. Then I'll usually cut out the audio of the sentence or word in Audacity. I listen to that until I can reproduce it verbally. Then I'll cover up the french on the sheet and try to translate it into french. I'll write it out until I get it right. I say the words out as I write them. Learn the next sentence (I'll usually do 10 or so phrases a day) then do them both, and work my way through them until I can reproduce them all.
That's the way I learn.
I then put them in Anki. The English on the front with the translation and audio file on the back. I feel this helps keep them in my memory. I also try to answer in Anki without thinking too much (of course I do have to stop and think sometimes) but I want the answer to be as automatic as possible.
twopossums on 01 May 2015
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