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After reading a post about flashcards at Yearlyglot, and the subsequent discussion that followed on Twitter, I’ve been thinking about using flashcards.
According to Randy of Yearlyglot, using flashcards is bad news for your progress. In fact, he says it’ll eventually destroy all your hard work because you have to think more when speaking your target language.
I, however, disagree with his arguments and think flashcards are not evil.
I know there are more people who don’t like using flashcards, because it’s just a lot of work and results may vary or may take a while to really show in your productive skills. Still, that’s not a reason to disregard them as a valuable tool in learning a foreign language.
Let me explain why.
Randy uses the example of learning a single word item using flashcards. As I said before, learning single word items is not a good idea. Even if you use a flashcard/SRS program to learn that single word, you won’t be able to put it in context, nor will you be able to understand the real meaning of the word.
In our discussion on Twitter, he said (in a rude way, I must say) that believing one sentence can provide enough context for a word is plain stupid. However, I often don’t see using flashcards as learning vocabulary.
No, I see flashcards as a great way of getting input + 1 (Krashen). Here input is something you understand well, and + 1 is something that is new to you. But because the context is familiar, you will be able to understand the meaning of the word or phrase that makes up the + 1 part.
Randy disagrees with this.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying using flashcards is essential or not, I’m just saying that using flashcards can be a great way to get some comprehensible input, as many language learning bloggers have explained long before me.
Take Steve Kaufman for example: he just enjoys reading books in his target language, and uses a flashcard system to not forget stuff he has read before. He has both comprehensible and familiar context in his flashcard deck.
When I speak with people who used flashcards to give their progress a boost, I notice they have a much bigger vocabulary than many other students who have been studying for the same amount of time.
Not only do they use sophisticated words some natives can’t even use, they also use more accurate vocabulary many learners will never be able to use correctly.
All because of just some lines of comprehensible context around a new part of the sentence; input + 1.
The story Randy tells about speaking less naturally is not familiar for me. I understand the part he talks about when speaking of the frustration one experiences when learning single word items, but experiencing frustration when learning full sentences? That doesn’t sound familiar to me.
Not only do people who use flashcards use more accurate vocabulary, they also sound more fluent and correct because they’ve been exposed to grammatically correct language.
The only downside I can think of is when people start using flashcards as a substitute for real input in the form of music, radio and television. But as long that’s not the case, I don’t see what the problem is.
Having said that, I don’t think (anymore) it’s absolutely essential to use flashcards to become good at your target language.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence that people who use flashcards are generally better speakers of their target language. Or maybe flashcard users are just more serious language learners that would’ve become just as fluent without the use of flashcards.
It would sure make interesting research, but for now we can only guess.
To answer the question I asked in the title ‘Is Using Flashcards Bad?’ I have to answer no.
However, I understand where Randy is coming from, as there is no real proof that flashcards are better than just getting more input. Still, I have to disagree with his remark about flashcards being poison for your language skills; that’s simply not my experience.
If that were true, the learners I know would speak crappy Spanish/Japanese/Chinese/English, but that’s not the case. I can confirm their Spanish and English are excellent, and native speakers confirm that the flashcard loving Japanese and Chinese learners also speak their language well.
In the end it doesn’t really matter what I think. Simply putting in a ridiculous amount of effort into learning Spanish will get you to speak Spanish.
It may take you a few hundred hours more to get there, but you’ll get there. When it comes to using flashcards or not, there is no bad choice you can make.
As long as you don’t substitute input for flashcards you’re good to go.
For people who are still interested in using flashcards to give their progress a boost: I’m planning on doing a (series of?) screencast(s) to explain how to collect sentences, the dos and don’ts when collecting sentences, what some good formats for flashcards are, how you should review the sentences you’ve collected, etc.
If you have special requests or suggestions, you can drop a comment in the comment section of this post, or send me an e-mail at ramses [at] spanish-only [dot] com.
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38 Comments…
Yeah I'm with you. I understand where Randy's coming from, and he makes some good points, but I think he went too far in totally dismissing them. They're valuable if used:
A) Properly (like you said, don't just have word A = word B without any examples or context)
B) In conjunction with lots of other things (music, movies, books, newspapers, talking with native speakers, which is the most important thing, etc.).
Also, do you go with the old-fashioned flashcards or a SRS? I'm using Anki now and loving it, never going back to actual physical cards.
Cheers,
Andrew
Hi Andrew, somehow your comment ended up in the spam folder, but I fished it out of it ;-).
Point B is a good one, as movies, etc. will just provide you with more context, and will help you notice things you already have in your deck but never really stood out.
Also, I go with Anki as well. It really has become better over the years, to the point that it's invaluable for me to prepare for tests and give my vocabulary a boost when I feel it's needed. Physical cards suck, indeed :-).
I agree with you, Ramses. I use SRS to remember what I've learned through input (mostly tv series). Not everything, obviously, but the phrases I really like I hold on to with SRS. I certainly don't see how this could hurt my learning. :/
"as there is no real proof that flashcards are better than just getting more input"
Actually there is. Psychological studies have been done on the effect of self-testing and memory, and they all agree that quizzes and flashcards are useful for learning languages because it increases the drive to learn and aids in long-term retention. The problem is that most people don't use flashcards correctly and drop certain items before they have actually learned them, thinking they have (but they've really just stored them in short-term memory). The goal is long-term retention through repetitive retrieval, so using flashcards (SRS or not) is a useful way to reinforce vocabulary input instead of just relying on input alone.
Thank you for your comment Jennie. I remember reading something like that in Krashen's papers, but I'm not sure in what way he talks about it. Could you like to research done on the subject?
The latest publication I read about is summarized here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/0912…
Dejé de seguir a Yearlyglot hace mucho tiempo. De vez en cuando dice unas cosas muy raras, que para mí eso se parece que sólo para atrapar atenciones de los lectores ( o mejor dicho, confundirles).
Me encanta la SRS. He aprendido un montón de palabras nuevas, los cuales escucho muy a menuda en las películas o en los libros y las reconozco. El problema mío es que no recuerdo bien (¿?) las frases y palabras. Quiero decir que cuando abro una tarjeta, después de leerla puedo responder. Sin embargo luego no recuerdo mucho y no puedo aplicarla a la conversación. La mayoría del vocabulario que uso normalmente es lo que aprendí antes de conocer SRS. ¡Qué raro!
Me gustaría que podrías decirme qué puedo hacer para er… resolver este problema.
Un saludo!
Hola Monocian:
Sí, le gusta la atención. Bueno, a mí no importa, pero si haces trampas para recibirla y después insultas a los lectores, pasas una línea, creo. Por eso es mejor que ya no leas ese blog ;-).
Hm, lo que dices no suena muy familiar. Bueno, también tengo tarjetas con frases que no puedo recordar ni después de unos meses, pero no importa. Lo más importante es entender la frase y la gramática. El cerebro hace el resto. No debes creerme, pero así funciona mi cerebro y como ves manejo el español bastante bien :-).
Pues no te preocupes, todo saldrá bien.
¡Chau!
Si no puedes recordarla y aplicarla a la conversación, me parece que no la has aprendido. Pero estas tan seguro que la culpa no es con SRS, por eso no escúchame. Claramente solo digo las cosas raras.
Hi Ramses, first of all it is good to see you back. On the topic of flash-cards, I do think they work –at least for me, when learning specialized vocabulary. I have literally thousands of flash cards that I made to learn medical and legal vocabulary. I tried the Anki version, but for me it just wasn't the same. The act of writing out the information on a physical card was part of the process to put the information into my memory. My brain is old-fashioned like that I guess.
On the opposite side I found that I do not learn non-specialized vocabulary well with flashcards and do better reading and hearing it in various contexts. I am not sure of the reason for this, other than my own quirky learning habits, but it works for me so I guess that is what matters. Again, Ramses, it is really good to see you back again.
David
Thanks mate :-).
You should do whatever feels good. To be honest: I only use flashcards to learn specialized vocabulary these days. It's not that they're not helping me for non-specialized vocabulary, but I pick that up from other sources anyway so there's no need to create cards for it.
And it's good to see you back as well
Do the names of fruits and vegetables count as specialized vocabulary?
Because I sure as heck don't run into that many while watching TV shows/movies.
Or reading for that matter
I used to live in Spain, so every day I went to the supermarket I'd see all these weird names. Call it real life SRS, but in the end I knew all the names. That, and my love for food and having friends that love to cook and teach me new recipes really made me a potention TV chef in Spain ;-).
Cool!
But what about people who don’t plan on moving to the country any time soon?
Should they use flashcards or simulate their own supermarket at home? :O
It took every bit of restraint I had not to post a huge rant on Randy's site, but I did hold back and stayed on the sidelines for the whole event. I've learned a lot from his site in the past several months, but this whole scenario nearly made me remove it from the list of language blogs I visit. (I didn't though and will continue to visit now that the topic has hopefully passed.)
I had no issue with his concept that flashcards and SRS systems aren't necessary to learn a language. I completely agree with that and lots of people learn languages without ever touching them. However, claiming they are detrimental contradicts a lot of what I've personally experienced as well as the stories I've read from numerous polyglots who use flashcards and/or SRS systems to learn and *are* fluent in the languages they learned using them (Barry Farber, Steve Kaufmann, Khatzumoto (AJATT), TheKorean (AskAKorean), the founders of Antimoon, etc. not to mention the owner of the site we are on right now).
Personally, my retention levels went *way* up when I started recording newly-learned information in my SRS instead of just letting it slip from my memory if I don't happen upon it again within the next few days. I got really tired of seeing a word and knowing I've learned it before, but I simply can't recall it now. Sure, that still happens now, but *far* less than it did before. I'll take the trade-off of 5-15 minutes of SRS review per day for that kind of benefit.
Also, I can't even imagine trying to learn Hanja (the Chinese characters as used in Korean) without something like an SRS. Sure it's possible, but I would have a hard time believing that it could be in any way easier. At least with Japanese and Chinese you see the characters regularly, but they aren't really used very heavily in modern Korean, so I don't get that constant exposure to them (they do still show up, just not nearly as often as their Hangul equivalents).
I guess you're learning Korean? When you don't use an SRS for something like Hanzi (or Kanzi/Hanja/whatever-you-want-to-call-them) you'll soon start using rote memorization. Trust me, I've been there. If you ask me, THAT's detrimental.
I've been learning both with and without using flashcards. And like you, my retention levels went WAY up. Sure, not everything you add is useful. Sure, not everything will stick. But there's a button called delete, and it's easy to make a (or several) new card(s) to help you get a certain structure or expression down.
Still, I understand where some flashcard haters are coming from. They see people getting crazy about flashcards, after which they declare their love for them and it becomes an exclusive "relationship". Well, when there's no healthy amount of real input that's not good, indeed.
Flashcards helped me because I knew they have a limited use, and that input is way more important than anything.
I'm learning Korean and Spanish, though Korean has been getting the bulk of my time lately.
Nobody here has written about SRS (Anki in my case) with sound. I feel like the cards I have with sound (which I mainly got from Spanishpod, has made a tremendously difference in my ability to speak. I wish it was easier to make cards with sound. Robin
Robin, I also use flashcards with audio, because when I read something I want to know exactly how every word in that context is pronounced. Unfortunately for me there's no such thing as PortuguesePod, but SpanishPod is indeed very handy.
Have you seen this post already?: http://www.spanish-only.com/2009/10/frenchpod-spa… (tip: check Alex's comment about getting sentences for free ;-))
i totally agree that audio with flashcards makes them so much better. i use brainscape, haven't checked out spanishpod, to learn spanish. in this app there are full sentences and really good audio (for most of the items).
Oooh – flashcards, my all-time favourite subject when it comes to language acquisition
Well here's my input for your series:
– Should I focus on a more thorough repetition (i.e. trying to transfer the unknown words/structures into active vocabulary) or rather on more varying input?
(If you go for repetition, then it may make sense to feed two identical Anki decks one of which being cloze, the other one ordinary.)
– consequently: how hard do I have to be on myself when ranking my knowledge? Does "understanding only" already qualify for an "easy" ranking in Anki?
– How do I handle irregular forms? I'm right now on my way learning Polish which has an awful lot of irregular verbs and strange numeralia constructions. Would it make sense to learn those forms separately rather than "designing" a sentence for each of them?
Best wishes, I really love reading your blog!
I'd like to add that he is indeed, VERY rude, not appreciating, or at least considering opinions of others. I give this as an example
"I find it terribly ironic that you're writing a comment about not translating, and through the course of your comment, you actually introduce forced translation to make your point!
Nobody says NL and TL, and your insistance on using those abbreviations forces me to do that same exact painful one-to-one translation step that we're all "supposedly" agreeing is bad.
FAIL."
It's hard to take a guy like that seriously. You, on the other hand, are quite the opposite. Thanks for the great articles, strategies, and a friendly environment! Your blog is AMAZING!
Thank man :-). Well, I try to be honest, but I don't think one has to be rude to be honest. Now, I'm not the one to judge Randy, that's something his readers should do. I'm just here to provide a positive place to exchange learning strategies.
"Not only do people who use flashcards use more accurate vocabulary, they also sound more fluent and correct because they’ve been exposed to grammatically correct language."
Do you seriously expect people to believe that what you find on a flashcard is more grammatically correct than what they read, for example, in a news article or in a book? And for that matter, am I supposed to believe that you can ever fit as much context into a card as what I would find in any paragraph of text anywhere on the internet?
Sorry, but I think you make far too many assumptions.
You also mischaracterize my position, though I suppose there's nothing I can do about that. You can never really know what I think… only what you think about what you hear or read from me, so I'll have to be content with the understanding that I haven't clearly expressed what I was wanted to say. Either that, or else you have willingly misunderstood it. I prefer to believe in the former, because I would hate to think of you as the type of person who would participate in the latter.
I argued quite a bit, saying that they were really bad but then I did practise them for a week or so, after seeing how everybody else uses them. I have to admit, they have greatly helped. My vocabulary is a lot higher (with emphasis on the lot). I think what Randy thinks is that they are bad because people only use flashcards. After signing up for lingq, I now see that they don’t and that they are just an aid. Most people on that sight have admitted to me that they are only for allowing us to remember that little bit more.
I think Randy as well was acting odd at that point as well. He choose to ignore a lot of facts that were presented to him.
Using Steve Kaufman as an example of why using flash cards is good is like using the Columbine Massacre as an example of why selling guns to kids is good.
If you listen to Steve Kaufman speak Chinese (one of his first and I believe he said his best foreign language), after decades studying and using the language he still has a vocabulary in the lower intermediate range.
He would be a classic example of why flash cards are useless.
And at the same time is Spanish is very good, and so is his French I believe. For both he uses flashcards, so I don't see the problem. Who knows why his Chinese is "bad (if it is, I don't know as I don't speak a word of Chinese)?
Anyway, I didn't want to pat myself on the back, but I've been a huge fan of flashcards since I started learning Spanish, and I think I have a very high level in Spanish (and so things many native speakers).
That’s a genuinely ipmrsesvie answer.
Flash cards are a HUGE help for me when learning/memorizing any suebjct (and especially new vocabulary). I’ve tried Anki before on just the PC and liked it but missed the ability to just pick up physical cards on the way out the door in the morning. However, I’ve never tried using the Android app sync’d to a web account. I’m going to have to try this as, my handwriting is atrocious and I can definitely type out new vocabulary quicker than I can write it out by hand. I may still prefer a hard-copy of my flash cards but this is definitely something for me to experiment with as an alternative.Thanks for the tip Eoin!Kelly
I think that your sentence database is great. Is there any way that I can get a copy of the database in excel or similar format so that I can transfer it to ANKI are Learning with Texts (another great tool)? Thanks.
Nope, people ask me that all the time but it's not possible in an easy way. You guys should set up a community project…
Pienso que el uso de flashcards no esta mal pues en mi experiencia a algunos de mis estudiantes les ha ayudado mucho, lo que se tiene que tomar en cuenta es que no todas las personas tienen el mismo ritmo de aprendizaje también que algunos aprenden mejor de una forma que otros.
I believe Flashcards are an extra tool that generally helps students who actually use them to increase their vocabulary at a faster rate. Flashcards should not be the main approach to learning a language. I would argue that a few minutes a day with a small number of cards, with examples of vocabulary you have a hard time remembering, will help you remember those items. Flashcards should be combined with extensive listening, writing and reading. Hours of flashcard use will make your learning boring and slow you down. On the other hand, a few minutes of flashcards, combined with extensive input, will help you. The approach you use will either make flashcards effective, or a fail.
Here is how I do it.
I listen to alot of dialog, both recorded and live. As I listen I write down "interesting" words in a notebook — words that are slightly familiar or new words that I want to learn. So now what? I got a bunch of words on a note pad.
Well, I then put each of those words in a sentence and then on a flashcard. After studying it, I now "own" that word. I can use it, and also understand what it means in a conversation. The key for me is not to learn the "word" but how it is used in the real world in phrases and sentences.
If you want to know what I mean, check out the word "quedar". It makes no sense to learn it alone, without a context.
I am really enjoying the theme/design of your website.
Do you ever run into any browser compatibility issues?
A few of my blog visitors have complained about my blog not
operating correctly in Explorer but looks great in Firefox.
Do you have any recommendations to help fix this problem?
I’d say: use flashcards. The fact I only use flashcards to learn specialized vocabulary doesn’t mean one can’t use it to learn other, non-specialized vocabulary, as well. I was just saying what I do, so maybe you interpreted it the wrong way.
If you can’t remember something and really need the vocabulary in the future, use SRS.
38 Comments…