Use Flashcards! The Ins and Outs of Flashcard use in language learning (Chinese, Japanese focus)
Picture from http://ankisrs.net/
Language learning is exposure and review, input and output. Input helps you learn, while output solidifies the knowledge, among other things. One problem is that our mind forgets things that we learn very quickly until the information has been moved into our long-term memory. The more you see something, the more important your brain thinks it is, thus the deeper the information goes down the rabbit hole and into your long-term memory.
Take the forgetting out of learning
SRS Flashcards help you remember stuff. Immersion and use forces you to remember some things, but not efficiently because what you are exposed to can be quite random. All you can do is be exposed to a word, look up the meaning, nod your head, move on and pray the next time you run into the word you remember it. You are much more likely to remember when immersed for sure, and had I tried to immerse myself more when I was in the US I’m sure I would have been much further along, but there are still limits.
Exposure through oral immersion can only get you so far because people speak differently than they write. Written exposure still requires that extra step of memorization. You can write the words in a book to come back to later to review, but why not just input them into a system that makes review much easier?
SRS based flashcards systemizes the whole process for you. Think of your brain as a funnel with new information coming in at the top and repeated exposure is the gravity that pulls it deeper into your memory. Flashcards give you the repeated exposure you need to solidify the memories. Without repeated exposure, the information begins its slow journey back up and out the funnel. SRS optimizes the process.
Learning Chinese and Japanese is harder than other languages because of characters. Characters require blunt memorization, which takes more time than anything else. Even if you don’t learn how to write Chinese characters, you still have to remember how to say them. If you can’t recognize characters and learn the spoken versions of them, you are severely limiting yourself. Words you hear, you will not be able to reproduce in written form. If you can’t say the word on the screen, you don’t know the word. I could read advanced Japanese texts AND understand some of the meaning before I even started learning Japanese, but that doesn’t mean that I knew Japanese.
The fastest way to learn new words is through reading. You can read way faster than you can speak and the words stay on the page rather than passing quickly. Again, when reading Chinese or Japanese characters, you need to constantly look up the corresponding pronunciations and memorize them. You can’t sound them out like other languages, so quick memorization is far more important early in order to be able to produce sounds. There is no getting around this.
Complete immersion makes this step easier. You will hear common words so often, that when you learn to recognize the meaning of characters it will be easier to connect them to the pronunciation.
Not everyone has the opportunity to be completely immersed, and not everyone wants to. Maybe you live in a country that doesn’t speak Chinese, have a full-time job, and have other hobbies. There are many things you can try in order to find ways to incorporate the language into your daily life – and I recommend doing this – but it’s not always possible to do everyday, leaving you with maybe an hour a day to learn and many off days. I wrote a post about the language learning formula before. By only spending so little time on the language every day, you are doomed to a high forget rate.
Even if you are completely immersed, there is randomness to exposure that doesn’t keep your memory constantly refreshed with what you’ve previously learned. Repetitive use in real life situations to counter-balance the process of forgetting is not always possible. There are always words that you would like to remember or even be able to use occasionally, like idioms and colloquial sayings, that even if you make a point to use these words twice a day for the next 3 days, you will still forget them in the future. That’s just how the brain works.
When I learned Chinese, I had the luxury of complete immersion. I was a student. I had LOTS of free time. I didn’t use flashcards, but I wish I did. I had a book that I carried everywhere with me that had words and their pinyin written down. I had a Chinese girlfriend. I spent most of my time around Chinese people. For much of my time in school I refused to speak English with my American classmates (and was given the nickname “辣辣的” for it, which means “spicy”; long story). I played video games in Chinese (no other choice really) in the internet cafe. My progression was fast because of my immersion, but I had no real system.
There was another student that came to China with no Chinese language background. He used flashcards to remember words, and his vocabulary quickly caught up with mine. I was much more fluent in what I did say, and sounded native, but his vocabulary surpassed mine without immersing himself and in less time than I had spent learning. He spent most of his time with Americans, and even dabbled into learning Korean and Japanese. The one time I visited his apartment, I was shocked by the amount of flashcards he used. He had thousands of cards in neat, sorted stacks spread around his room. If only he had Anki then…
There were problems in both of our methods. He spent too little time immersed (and didn’t have a smart phone with SRS flashcards installed), and I didn’t systemize my learning past a little book that I carried around. I was exposed to more of the language than he was (by far), but I had no way of remembering what I learned. I’d forget most of the words I wrote down.
I didn’t remember very much after the year I spent studying Mandarin in the states. The summer after that year, I remember reviewing words like “turn left” and “to move (house/home)”, and then reviewing them again when I got to China. A year and THAT’s what I was left with?!
Having a plan and building a system is essential to making sure this doesn’t happen to you. Flashcards are a part of that system.
How to use Flashcards
First of all, you’re going to need to download a flashcard program for your computer, and also one for your smartphone if you have one. I recommend using Anki, but there are other programs out there, like supermemo and mnemosyne. I actually highly recommend going through the articles at supermemo about learning and the brain. Understanding how to learn is a very important skill.
You do NOT use flashcards to learn new words. This will doom you to not only learning vocabulary that isn’t of the most use to you RIGHT NOW, and also isn’t how the mind works! You need to be exposed to the word first outside of the flashcard environment. Flashcards are for review. Vocabulary decks are terrible… after a point.
When starting a new language:
When you just begin learning a language you can learn new words in Flashcard form. You don’t have any knowledge of grammar and have a vocabulary of 0, so it’s either spend your first 10 hours in a dictionary, or spend them flipping through Flashcards before you can even really start to comprehend grammar. I recommend smart.fm decks for this, as they come with audio and very simple sentences to help ease you into the language. The most common 200 words are so essential and can be learned so quickly through flashcards, that not doing so is wasting time.
Flashcards are also essential for getting enough repetition of the new alphabet (or pinyin in Chinese) to make it second nature. In Japanese my hiragana and katakana decks both had audio attached to them, so I also was able to plough repetitions quickly and get used to the sounds of the language at the same time.
Once you have a basic vocabulary of around 300-500 words, you need to switch learning modes. Vocabulary decks have exhausted their use and I’m sure you’ll have exhausted your motivation as well. Flashcards are boring, so spending more time in them than we have to inevitably leads to burn out, which means quitting for many people. Even if you just stop for a while, much damage will be done; the mind forgets what it doesn’t use.
Don’t learn everything:
I must make a quick point though that it’s not efficient to try to remember everything that you’re exposed to. You are going to be exposed to a lot of language that you absolutely don’t need to remember right now, and trying to remember it, even with SRS, is going to waste your time.
This is one of the main reasons why most textbooks are not useful. They expose you to information that is not important to your life and your level. Nearly every textbook has library as one of the first words you have to learn. Honestly, if I had never learned how to say library in Chinese I would be just fine. I don’t think I’ve ever used that word before.
Don’t write down everything (although you can if you have that much time). Limit yourself so you can really focus on each word to lessen the amount of time spent on each word, and the amount of time you have to spend reviewing. Make a goal for each day, and don’t go over that goal. Instead, use your extra time to use the language, rather then spending more time on review.
SRS decks pile up pretty quick. The first day is easy, but the second day has double the words because you have to review words from the previous day as well. The third day often has up to triple the words. Take it easy; it’s a long-term process.
Of course if you are trying to be like the world’s greatest polyglot, you probably won’t have time to distinguish between what you need now and what you need later; but that’s not for everyone.
How do you know when something is important to remember?
When you feel the need to remember something, that’s when it’s important to remember. If you read a sentence and aren’t interested, or aren’t interested in something a friend said, then don’t write it down. It’s that simple.
Also, if you want to say something but can’t, that’s a good reason to remember a word. The general rule is that any word that you have the need to use at any time is good enough to be put into your flashcard deck.
I can say “I’m a Chinese to English translator (私の仕事は中国語から英語に翻訳するです)” in Japanese even though I’m still a beginner in the language. Why? Because that’s important to my life. Then again, so is sayingナルト and 漫画!
This is a trial and error process, as every person is different. It’s ok to delete flashcards from your deck when you realize that you aren’t motivated to learn that word yet and find yourself failing it over and over again.
Sentence Mining:
I’m going to do a separate post about sentence mining later, but the basics are that you don’t ever, EVER save just words. You save sentences. You mine for sentences in your daily life (meaning search and save) to be put in the question side of your flashcards. There are a million reasons why this is better than learning single words: you learn how to actually use the word, you remember the context of where you were exposed to the word, you are exposed to grammar at the same time, etc.
A flashcard doesn’t necessarily even have to focus on a word, but it could also focus on a grammar point. Try to keep the new information on each card narrowed down to one new piece of information.
The question side contains the sentence, and the answer side contains any notes that you need to help you remember the meaning of the sentence and how to pronounce it. This almost always includes pinyin or hiragana (Chinese/Japanese).
Quick example:
Question side: “你怎么这么宅？”
Answer Side: “宅 – zhai2 – Hermit-like, someone that always stays at home and never goes out.”
Write the answer in the target language:
Eventually you want to start writing your answers in your target language rather than your native language. This keeps you from translating in your head, and keeps you immersed through the entire process. You want to get rid of your native language crutch as soon as possible and as often as possible.
Say it out loud
Sound is extra input to package up with your words to be sent to your brian. Help your memory out by saying the words while you read them and say them so you can hear yourself speak. Try not to listen to music while you learn as it will take a part of your attention away.
Stay Attentive
If you find your attention slipping and you going through flashcards passively, stop doing them. I’ve found myself flipping over the answers to flashcard questions without even trying hard to rack my brain for the answer.
How much time it takes:
I spend 30 minutes a day on flashcards. In the beginning I thought that flashcards were going to be end-all to boredom on the train, but it turned out that even while learning 15 words a day, I wasn’t able to spend more than 30 minutes reviewing everything. I have nearly 2 hours of train time a day to and from work, meaning that I still have enough time to watch an entire movie every day in Japanese, write blog posts, or write lang-8 posts.
15 minutes a day might be enough for most people, but for those of you that are really immersed (students of language studying abroad), I bet you could get enough input throughout your day that 1 hour will be more like it. 1 hour a day may seem like a lot, but 1 hour a day means that you will remember everything that you’ve learned thus far. How much time do you spend on the toilet everyday? Waiting in line for something? Waiting for your girlfriend to get ready to go out? If you have a smart phone (or even just an ipod touch), you can use flashcards anywhere, so you could just use the time you would normally in la-la land on keeping your memories fresh.
If you find yourself spending too much time everyday on flashcards, you are overdoing it. Slow down. Learn fewer words a day. Think about which words you are writing down. Ask yourself if you have to delete some of the cards in your deck.
Go into upkeep mode when you feel burned out
Upkeep mode in Anki is easy. If you feel burned out, or missed a few days and your reviews have built up, just stop learning new words for a while and work on up keeping what you have; it doesn’t take very much work and you can rest easily without worrying about losing what you’ve already done.
Get sleep
Sleep is essential for memory and health. Seriously people, get enough sleep.
Don’t forget when you’re not using the language
The greatest thing about learning a language using SRS is that you will never completely forget what you’ve learned, and when you do forget something, the program will eventually ask you to review it (probably pretty quickly). If you stop learning a language and stop using it at one point, you don’t have to worry about losing your ability to use it – the program takes care of that. This is one of my favorite things about SRS. Even when I’m busy with something else, I can spend a few minutes everyday and very easily maintain my skill.
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Get a system going! Stop forgetting what you’ve learned and start pumping out those repetitions. It doesn’t take that much effort to get a system down for logging new information into flashcard form, and then creating a new habit for reviewing your cards. It takes too little time and is too important for you to NOT do it, especially for all of you that are living abroad.
Step 1) Download Anki
Step 2) Input info
Step 3) Review
Step 4) Benefit
Related posts:
- The Language Learning Formula
- Frustrating phases in language learning – How to focus your efforts
- Don’t Learn to Write Chinese Characters
- Japanese Day 1 and New Language Learning Methods
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Aegeanhe
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http://beyondbounds.org/ Jason Sharp
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http://beyondbounds.org/2010/11/sentence-mining-an-essential-tool-for-language-learning/ Sentence Mining: An Essential Tool for Language Learning | Beyond Bounds Blog