How to use flashcards and Anki effectively: better cards, daily reviews, no burnout

TUREFF• •0

Flashcards are one of the most efficient ways to remember vocabulary, but they are also one of the easiest to misuse. People either make cards that do not teach them anything useful, or add so many that the daily reviews become a chore and they quit. Here is how to get the benefit without that.

Why spaced repetition works

You forget new information quickly unless you review it, and each review at the right moment makes the memory last longer before the next one is needed. Spaced repetition software schedules each card for you: cards you know well come back after longer and longer gaps, and cards you get wrong come back soon. Anki is the best-known free program for this, on computers and Android; the official iPhone app is paid. Other apps use similar ideas. Recent versions of Anki include an optional scheduler called FSRS, which Anki's own documentation says can reach the same retention with fewer reviews than its older default algorithm.

Make good cards

A good card asks one thing, and you know whether you got it right.

One fact per card. "Word meaning" is one card; "word gender" can be another.
Make it about recall, not recognition. Seeing the word and remembering the meaning is easier than producing the word from the meaning. Do both directions for words you want to use.
Keep the back short. If you cannot check your answer in a couple of seconds, the card is too big.
Add audio where you can, so you learn pronunciation with the word.
Use images instead of translations for concrete nouns where it helps.
Make your own cards for what you meet in real reading and listening. Pre-made decks are useful for a start, but cards you made from your own sources tend to stick better.

Sentence cards

Single words are hard to use. A sentence card shows a whole sentence containing one new word, with the word highlighted.

The front: a natural sentence you understood apart from one word.
The back: the word's meaning, the full translation if you need it, and audio.
Aim for sentences where only one thing is new. If a sentence has three unknown words, it is not ready to be a card.

Sentence cards teach grammar, collocations and how the word is actually used.

Daily reviews

Do your reviews every day. Missed days pile up, and a backlog is the main reason people give up.
Reviews first, new cards after. If time is short, skip new cards rather than reviews.
Grade honestly. If you hesitated or guessed, mark it as wrong or hard. Marking it right to clear the screen only shortens your memory.
Short sessions are fine. Twenty minutes at the bus stop counts.

Choose your new card limit carefully

Anki's default is a maximum of 20 new cards a day, and its manual notes that learning 20 a day steadily leads to roughly 200 reviews a day. Every new card you add today becomes reviews for weeks. If your reviews take longer than you want to spend, lower the number of new cards, not the reviews.

Avoiding burnout

Start small, perhaps 5 to 10 new cards a day, and increase only if reviews feel easy.
Delete or suspend cards that annoy you or that you no longer care about.
Fix leeches: cards you fail again and again usually need rewriting, a picture, an example sentence or splitting into two.
After a break, do not try to clear a huge backlog in one go. Stop adding new cards and work through reviews a manageable amount each day.
Remember flashcards are support, not the whole method. Reading, listening and speaking are where words become yours; cards just keep them from slipping away.

How do you use flashcards in your own learning, and what card format works for you? Share it or ask a question in the comments.