Flashcards can be paper (or digital) word cards with an English word you’re trying to learn on one side, with either a translation into your language or a definition in English on the other. Flashcards seem to offer a quick and easy way to learn a large amount of vocabulary- some language learners claim that they can add 100 words in a day to their long-term memory by using flashcards! But is using flashcards for learning vocabulary effective? Listen to Episode 26 to hear five stories about students’ successes and failures learning vocabulary with flashcards.
That’s such a great topic! Flashcards are a good tool, but firstly students need to work closely with an item, its definition, collocations, examples etc, secondly they need to revise the vocab regularly until it settles down in their head. I personally don’t think much of Quizlet, such apps as Anki (rather dated design)or Reword based on spaced repetition are much more helpful and offer some options like including pronunciation, pics and easy tests.
As always, I am glad to hear your angle on these topics, as you’re one of the few people I know who has taught language for longer than I have!
I totally agree with you on Anki- it has a very dated looking interface. I tried Quizlet last summer for learning Polish and liked the look and feel of the site. The voices were somewhat robotic, but I’d imagine that will see improvement. I had pretty much the same experience with Quizlet as before- I started using the site because of my completionist tendencies (read: neuroticism) and as usual, soon became overwhelmed by the amount of words I was adding.
Also 100% on the need to learn vocabulary in all the other ways you mentioned, and that multiple encounters with this or that word, including surprise ones, are needed to really make a piece of vocabulary anchor in one’s memory.
Also worth mentioning is Babbel- its advertisements somehow give the impression that it is a language course, but in reality its content and arrangement place it somewhere between high-end flashcards and a basic language course.
The subscription is not cheap (annual is around 60USD, prices I am certain vary by region), but the pre-made content accuracy-checked and decent (if also basic) and saves you the time compared to making your own deck of cards.
There is little to no explicit grammar teaching.
If you’ve had success with cards and like them, and are ready to spend some money, Babbel is pretty good.
For me flashcards hardly work. I’ve tried it many times…but they are too static. There isn’t enough dynamic and has nothing to do with the real life. Apart from that, even if i know the translation this doesn’t mean that i can recognize the word and meaning at the sentence. There are two options what works for me. Put the stickers to the all stuff around me. Or combine the words by the theme i am interesting in this moment – theater, travel, mental health etc. And the second one are the collocations. Sometimes there isn’t any logics and you only have to remember them.
You hit the nail on the head with knowing a word’s translation while practicing with cards is far from a guarantee that you will recognize the word and meaning. Another way to say it is this- the belief that flashcards are really helpful is often based on confusing a word’s pronunciation or spelling with what the word in fact DOES- communicate a certain meaning.
I have heard the stickers option before, but have never done it myself.
I do think that flashcards can be useful at the beginning levels of language learning. They help to anchor less this or that word in the mind, but rather isolated pronunciations of words so you can get a sense of a language’s sounds and how typical words look.
Beyond beginner level, I am not a fan (and yet come back to cards from time to time anyways!).