The Science Of Flashcards For Language Learning

My vocabulary decks: www.ankicoredecks.com/
All scientific references taken from: www.routledge.com/The-Routled...
In this video, Loïs discusses the research on using flashcards for language learning. He explains what flashcards are and how they can be used effectively.
Loïs addresses common criticisms of flashcards and provides evidence to support their effectiveness. He also discusses the importance of retrieval in vocabulary learning and the different types of information that can be included in flashcards.
Loïs talks about scheduling reviews and the benefits of longer review intervals. He concludes by discussing whether semantically related words should be learned together.

[@denfu6638]

As always, your video is great ! I am French, learning Spanish. If I can share my experience using flashcards : - I totally agree that productive retrieval is more effective. Your native language 1st - Take your time to review your cards. It’s not a race, let your brain work. - You need around 2000 words. After that, you can add cards, but do so very meticulously. It’s not about the number of words, it’s about how useful they are. - If the target language has a lot of cognates, it is good to make a deck specifically with those words. - I personally add movements with certain cards while reviewing them. Work with words that engage all five senses. - You can put multiple synonyms for a word or expression, but not more than three. It will take more time, but you’re still going to acquire them. - Big flashcards can actually work if the concepts in them are related. For example, I made a flashcard about how to talk about the weather. It was better that way rather than making a lot of small cards. - There are some words or expressions that your brain doesn’t want to remember. In that case, I sometimes just suppress the card. There’s no use in inflicting unnecessary pain on yourself. - It stand to reason but you have to add talking and writing in the target language to boost your vocabulary acquisition

[@jamesm.9285]

This is brilliant content! Thank you, Loïs. Your channel is on its way to very high places in the language learning sphere, I've no doubt.

[@loistalagrand]

Wow, thank you!

[@DavidSinghiser]

@@loistalagrand I agree. I've been watching language learning videos for many years (since 2015?). I find myself listening to your videos first now.

[@penssuck6453]

I still make my own physical flashcards, using sentences, but I do a lot of pre-flashcard grammar study so I get a pretty good sense of what each word is doing in the sentence, the sentence structure, and the conjugations and declensions at work. For me, it's not very time consuming. I can sit down and make 50 cards easily in two hours, writing them out by hand, but I could never learn 50 cards in two days, so I can always produce them much faster than I can consume them (let's say), so it's more than efficient for me. I speak English and Spanish, and now I'm learning Czech. I usually put one sentence on one side and the translation on the other, but with some expressions (sometimes not full sentences), I put three on the same card: e.g. "the big cat", "the bigger cat", and "the biggest cat" on the same card. I would imagine this works well if you do it with a family of adjective-adverb-noun: e.g. beautiful, beautifully, and beauty. I've heard that putting up to five related words (such as five colors) is more effective than a single word per card. Anyway, I just found your channel and I'm enjoying the content. Děkuju.

[@Shibby27ify]

I'm fluent in Spanish as an English learner and I'm now beginning French while trying to become high level fluent in my Spanish. Although I use LingQ and love it. I set it to sentence mode and listen to each clip of a piece of media 3-20 times and look up words. But the "natural SRS" I have never found sufficient. My short term memory is naturally horrible. So Anki is a gigantic help. The one thing people forget to mention about flashcards is that they don't work well in isolation if you're not also consuming the language. One point I figured out on my own is that at an advanced level, my Spanish specifically, I have a gigantic vocabulary. But I need to work on outputting good grammar. So I sentence mine any sentence that I don't 100% understand immediately or sentences that have been corrected by a teacher. This way I can grind nagging grammar points without having to explicitly study grammar, of which I avoid at all costs.

[@GaryGruenhagen]

Nice summary on using flashcards for vocabulary acquisition. A related topic I would like to learn more about is learning with "chunks". Using flashcards would be an excellent way of learning chunks as well as words.

[@slasher42vs]

Incredible video!

[@Kaspertangen]

Thank you for doing your homework and sharing well prepared and researched information, and not just anecdotal stories and opinions. This was really helpfull! Great quality. 😊

[@loistalagrand]

Thanks for watching!

[@user-zm9gc1kt8b]

I always said that writing your own flashcards on blank business cards was the best method for building a few thousand words. Write the word at the top then after you feel that you know it, then put it in a sentence underneath so you also learn by context. Thanks for a great video! Subscribed

[@mcwurscht]

I believe the essay you are refering to, is "Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge" by Dr Piotr Wozniak. He's a long-time guru of the srs world.

[@user-qu3xk1ou6s]

Flashcards can be useful, but making them is a hassle. I've tried it several times, and it has actually been detrimental to my motivation. As a language learner, motivation is everything to me. Losing motivation may end up with total abandon. Better late than never. And now, as AI is becoming more and more powerful, I prefer to ask AI to help me with my review rather than creating flashcards myself.

[@soutanorogami7444]

It might sound stupid, but I'm not native english and that's one of the reasons why I'm watching your video. The second one is improving my listening comprehension skill and watch some content (yeah, from my point of view, I have an addiction).

[@michaels3003]

Not stupid at all. His spoken English is excelent and his diction is great. Way above average on YT including native speakers.

[@user-ic4ce8xb5v]

Hi Loïs! Thank you for this video and all of your past videos, I have watched you for a while. I have a question about some of these studies, I believe Bill Van Patten disputes the quality of some of these studies about explicit vocab learning, and I'm planning to rewatch his interviews to find that, but do you know what I'm referring to? I have personally tried flashcards and I find it much harder to remember words without context, I know it's not scientific because it's just my anecdote, but I find learning vocab in the context of a story gives me much more to grab onto whereas learning vocab via SRS has felt like learning random sounds to me, as difficult as trying to remember the order of random digits. I can't figure out why my experience seems to match so badly with this research, but if SRS really is scientifically backed for language learning I might give them another try. In the meanwhile, I have been re-reading and re-listening to as a form of review in context.

[@Kaspertangen]

I`ve been pasting interresting sentences from tv shows into anki, using SRS on them. I found it pritty effective. The sentence often reminds me of the greater context of a scene in a movie or show, which makes it more memorable (and fun to review). Compared to that, it has been much harder with the cards that has only a single word. Lately I started going through a frequenct list, using anki. I made two cards for each word, the first with the word and its translation, and the second card for the word`s example sentence and its translation. At the same time I also started to use assosiations to the words I`m learning, which I did not do before. It is really effective! Now, the assosiations gives me that story or vivid image that the tv-shows gave me before. So now all of a sudden it swaped. The sentences lack the context of the tv-shows and is very taxing, but the single words are easier (as long as I use associations though!). This video and your comment gave me an idea. I will exchange my sentence cards. They are difficult and demotivation to me when not connected to tv-series. Instead I will make them into word cards, but just opposite direction. But I will keep an example sentence or two on the flip side of the card, not to actively memorize it, but to read as an example that hopefully will aid the memorization without being taxing. We`ll see :=

[@user-ic4ce8xb5v]

@@Kaspertangen That sounds like a good idea, your comment and this video made me think about maybe doing something like that too where I use my reading to mine for sentences like you do so the card reminds me of the context. I might compare doing that versus rereading and relistening to see what works better. Maybe I need to get scientific and measure what I can actually remember and see which method is more effective for me, and I'll compare words remembered vs time spent.

[@paulwalther5237]

Listening to your video I think I’m going to scrap sentences and just go vocabulary flash cards. Matt vs Japan had biased me to want to use sentences so much but years and years of studying I haven’t been able to make it work.

[@jakiru8783]

I'd love an rpg 'game' where you can learn the language through relatively normal but interesting situations in the environment such as by interacting with the locals. When you communicate with NPCs (the target language) in a way they understand it helps you progress to new areas or unlock new activities. Based on what I've already seen I'm hoping all this AI technology being experimented with can get us something like that very soon.

[@ya.jibriil]

Is the fastest way to learn how to speak English with a 1 on 1 teacher ? If yes what are the criteria that you looking for a teacher ? Merci pour ton temp!!

[@davidpardocossio8995]

I would like to know how you organise your decks. My worry with flashcards is that you keep them accumulating. What do you do when you have 2000 words to review, for exemple?

[@loistalagrand]

You should review your cards often enough that this never happens.

[@rpg9392]

I just can't imagine using productive retrieval for Chinese. Already having to learn the romanized component, a tone, characters, a meaning, and the individual meanings of characters in character compounds & potentially try to make sense of how to break down the characters. I'll consider once I have maybe 3000 characters under my belt maybe.. until then, it's just too much. Let me cook. lol

[@azatsultanov6713]

I wonder how long ago you started learning learning English?

[@paulwalther5237]

I didn’t know people felt that using your native language on flash cards or to look up words led to never thinking in the language. Who the heck thinks that? Steve Kaufman is huge on KZbin and he is against monolingual dictionaries for language learners. Does anyone think he translates in his head? I can say from my personal experience this is crap. I was convinced flash cards were a waste of time when I studied European languages. I just always forgot them when I went to review them a few days later. But studying Japanese I forced myself to use flash cards since I simply couldn’t read or listen to Japanese as a beginner (or low intermediate later 😂). I now better understand my personal capabilities and limitations regarding rote memory (flash cards basically) and they’re not useless but I definitely do forget them a lot. But I also forget words I lookup reading a book repeatedly. Anyway. I think active recall is very powerful but I always burn out with it. I tried experimenting like using it to prep new words and then switch the words to passive recall so I wouldn’t burn out but I couldn’t find a balance with that. I basically gave up. Unless I’m studying for a test then I’m not going to use active recall. But I keep experimenting with flash cards. I feel like there must be a better way. Just the other day I decided to try sentences cards with an English sentence on side one and I can listen to (but can’t see) the audio for L2. I’ve only been doing it a couple days. Typically, sentence cards are like active recall for me in that I burn out. Unless I’ve studied the language a LOT like I have with Japanese. But I’ve also learned so much Japanese I don’t really care to study Japanese flash cards anymore. So kind of a catch 22. Once I’m advanced enough to use sentence flash cards I don’t want to use flash cards anymore. If you mine random vocabulary you encounter in the wild as a beginner or low intermediate you’ve probably added a lot of leeches to your deck or had a scenario where the reviews just add up way too much and you’re burning out. I saw a KZbin video where this guy just marked every card right on his SRS app unless the interval were 2 months. Then he would mark it wrong if he got it wrong. I tried this for a while and it’s actually really good. I would get stuff wrong and mark it right but get it right sometimes even with a bigger interval. Currently I’m just limiting the amount of cards I fail just like I would limit the amount of new cards I add. I don’t just mark everything right although this takes a lot of stress out of reviewing I can tell you and it seems like a good option.

[@jakiru8783]

Always like reading your comments on various videos. Have you considered Dynamic Flashcards? 'Organic Japanese with Cure Dolly' has a video talking about it and more. Maybe it'd help with the burn out.