Daily flashcards - brain changing?

[Dlezcano]

I have been making daily sessions since the last year with the following configurations: fill in the blanks showing pronunciation and definition and with only the definition. The effects have been that I don't forget anymore some of the characters I always struggled with and that my handwriting has improved a little. On the other hand I feel I should make some "choose the correct answer tests" since I am able to write characters like 宕 when I am asked for, but surprisingly I am unable to recall their pronunciation if I see them out of context.

It should be noted that I use the tests mainly to remember Chinese characters for words I already know plus some new words I learn here and there.

I also have been doing Anki for Japanese and the experience has been quite different because I recently started feeling that I was only getting a good competence for passing some tests, but I wasn't getting almost any benefit in practical situations. Maybe I could identify more words in some situations but that was all, so in my case those are the main benefits of flashcards.

[骏马的丕沿?]

2 hours ago, realmayo said:

13 hours ago, 骏马的丕沿? said:

 

https://www.evullab.org/pdf/CepedaPashlerVulWixtedRohrer-PB-2006.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1876761/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016643280200270X

 

(I certainly believe there are pitfalls associated with using flashcards to learn a foreign language - and I've fallen into them myself - but saying they "don't promote long-term retention" runs contrary to scientific findings, personal experience, and common sense. It's possible you didn't express yourself as clearly as you'd hoped.)

 

Thanks - these were really interesting!

 

As a couple of users pointed out, I think it has become clear that the way, specifically, that flashcards are used is important.

 

I don’t know if this was made clear, but I didn’t mean to speak about flashcards by itself. Rather, I wanted to make a comparison between flashcards and something else, and then draw a relative conclusion.

 

Theoretically speaking, for every time one reviews a word/character/etc. with only a flashcard, if he/she replaces this single instance of repetition with an instance of repetition that is not done via a flashcard, but rather via a real-world context, then that is where my argument stems from. My main argument is that the latter promotes long-term retention better than the former. (whether or not the latter is feasible/practical merits its own conversation)

 

I didn’t get to read the the whole texts of the papers you linked (only parts of it), as I just woke up, but I will definitely look into it further today after work!

[Jan Finster]

44 minutes ago, 骏马的丕沿? said:

if he/she replaces this single instance of repetition with an instance of repetition that is not done via a flashcard, but rather via a real-world context, then that is where my argument stems from. My main argument is that the latter promotes long-term retention better than the former. (whether or not the latter is feasible/practical merits its own conversation)

 

The truth is probably somewhere in between. Reading is probably the most effective, but not necessarily the most time efficient. I know from personal experience that flashcard memorising HSK 1-3 is super easy and gets you head start when you start with Chinese. Once you are at a level where you have thousands of flashcards to review, then it is probably useful to select only super important or useful words. Especially if those words are useful but uncommon as you may not encounter them in context often enough.

 

There is also an opportunity cost to consider: what activity are you not doing, because you are flashcarding? On the other hand you could ask if reading 1.5 hour per day is really that much better than reading only 1 hour per day and flashcarding 30 min per day... 

[Sreeni]

3 hours ago, realmayo said:

I certainly believe there are pitfalls associated with using flashcards to learn a foreign language - and I've fallen into them myself

what are the pitfalls and how, you overcome them. can you share two or three main pitfalls?it will benefit us, learners. Thanks

[骏马的丕沿?]

44 minutes ago, Jan Finster said:

The truth is probably somewhere in between. Reading is probably the most effective, but not necessarily the most time efficient. I know from personal experience that flashcard memorising HSK 1-3 is super easy and gets you head start when you start with Chinese. Once you are at a level where you have thousands of flashcards to review, then it is probably useful to select only super important or useful words. Especially if those words are useful but uncommon as you may not encounter them in context often enough.

 

There is also an opportunity cost to consider: what activity are you not doing, because you are flashcarding? On the other hand you could ask if reading 1.5 hour per day is really that much better than reading only 1 hour per day and flashcarding 30 min per day... 

 

I checked out the papers. They’re mostly related to space repetition. They don’t mention anything of significance which I, nor anyone else here, didn’t already know about.

 

There might an exception - flashcards might be a necessity in the very beginning, but that’s only for the first few months, or first year, if that.

 

There is no opportunity cost to even speak of. 1.5 hours of reading is undeniably a more effective way of learning and retaining than 1 hour of reading followed by a half hour of flashcarding. If you think it’s taking you too long to read a given text, then that probably means the text isn’t suitable for your level.

[realmayo]

You said flashcards don't promote long-term retention. Those papers indicate that flashcards do promote long-term retention. That's all. Everything else has been well-discussed on these forums plenty of times before now.

 

1 hour ago, Sreeni said:

what are the pitfalls

 

Flashcards can be a time/energy/motivation destroyer if your deck gets too big. And if you do flashcards at the expense of actually using the language, it can also give you a false sense that you've improved your Chinese more than you actually have.

 

I also think some words are better suited to long-term flashcards than others. Words you can easily connect with the meaning are easy: a rare word like "茶垢" (a stain on a cup or teapot caused by tea) is quite easy to remember, I think.

 

But more common words like 物资 or 提倡 or 推行  might be much harder as flashcards (their meaning might be more vague or abstract or easily confused with similar words) - but you might have no problem with them in real life. So why waste your time constantly getting them wrong as flashcards?  Better to take them out of your deck as soon as you realise they're a problem and if you keep getting them wrong in real life, re-learn them and re-add them to the deck.

 

I now suspend any card that I get wrong twice (once it's out of its initial 'learning' or 're-learning' phase). If I later see it and get it wrong in real life, I can unsuspend it and re-learn it.

 

I also think the nature of Chinese characters makes it too easy to 'cheat' with vocabulary. If you just test Chinese->English, is it a problem that you can often "decipher" - rather than "remember" - a word? For instance if I see 半島 as a flashcard do I think "peninsula" or do I think "half+island ... oh yeah that's peninsula"? So I'll make sure I also test myself on the pinyin-> English and English-> pinyin for all new vocabulary, so I feel I have really learned a word.

 

The key thing is to control your flashcards, culling words that are taking an outsized amount of your time, rather than let the flashcards control you.

[骏马的丕沿?]

20 minutes ago, realmayo said:

You said flashcards don't promote long-term retention. Those papers indicate that flashcards do promote long-term retention. That's all. Everything else has been well-discussed on these forums plenty of times before now.

No - my main point is not that flashcards don’t promote long-term retention, but rather, they don’t promote long-term retention as well as reading (or something similar to reading) does. Please refer to my previous comment.

 

Also, I forgot to mention: I just want to make it clear, here, that we are discussing “learning new vocabulary” and learning the “meanings of words” (whether via flashcards or not). When it comes to something like writing by hand, for example, that’s a totally different ball game. While you can expand your vocabulary and better understand words’ meanings and usages via “spaced repetition” via daily reading, you can’t improve your writing ability, and can minimally improve your ability to distinguish physically similar characters, via daily reading. When it comes to writing (hand-writing, in particular), flashcards (or some form of spaced repetition) are great. I use spaced repetition all the time when I practice writing.

[realmayo]

17 hours ago, 骏马的丕沿? said:

Flashcards don't promote long-term retention. At this point, I prefer that you provide copies of scientific papers, if you want to say otherwise.

 

OK, I think that's where the confusion came from.

 

18 minutes ago, 骏马的丕沿? said:

flashcards ... they don’t promote long-term retention as well as reading

 

The thing is, we have no way of knowing if this is true or not! I would guess it's false for unambiguous vocabulary items, and true for more complex pieces of vocabulary (which probably make up the majority of more common words).

 

But anyway, long-term retention is only one part of the skills required to read comfortably and quickly. And most people want to get good at reading, not good at flashcards. Which is why I agree it's good to be wary of flashcards, and very nervous of spending too much time on them. Also I agree with this:

 

Quote

It’s a messy combination of: discouragement of incidental learning via reading, and therefore a decrease in exposure to culturally and/or philosophically specific information, and therefore a potential increase in instances of misunderstanding and a potential decrease in interest, the lack of practice in “guessing” (for example, mentally connecting contextual clues in a text or audio), and therefore a lack of practice for critical thinking

 

 

[骏马的丕沿?]

3 hours ago, realmayo said:

The thing is, we have no way of knowing if this is true or not! I would guess it's false for unambiguous vocabulary items, and true for more complex pieces of vocabulary (which probably make up the majority of more common words).

I think that a serious conversation about whether this is “true” or not would have to be rather complex. At the end of the day, none of us are some kind of linguistic experts. We can only bounce bits of facts and subjective experiences off of each other.

 

Based purely on my subjective experiences, though, I believe what I said in my previous two comments to be true.

 

Don’t get me wrong - I love flashcards. I use them often for hand-writing and characters’ Mandarin pronunciations. But for learning new vocabulary and their meanings and usages, though, I found, after many years, that daily reading (without having to couple it with flashcards) is more efficient, particularly for the long-term (at least for me).

 

EDIT: also, I don’t mean to get too off-track, but there’s something to be said about “universality.” On one end of the spectrum, I think we can say that the statement, “the skin tightens and hair follicles stand up when a person is exposed to cold weather” is relatively universal (unless that person is genetically atypical). On the other end, the statement, “milk brings about a feeling of disgust within a person when he/she drinks it” can obviously be true for one person, but not for another - it’s highly subjective. Likewise, “spaced repetition is more effective than unorganized/non-spaced repetition” is probably also mostly universal. To what extent is “daily reading (at a suitable level) alone is a more effective way of learning and retaining vocabulary, for the long term, than using flashcards” universal, or not universal? I personally think it’s probably more universal than not - feel free to disagree, though. Just food for thought.

[Sreeni]

On 3/8/2021 at 11:14 PM, realmayo said:

flashcards ... they don’t promote long-term retention as well as reading

Can you take this 5 min Sample reading and see how is your reading and retention? rather than statistics use our own experience? Who are using flash cards ?

 

1. Did you understand everything ? Context?

2. Any vocabulary from this, still you want to add to your flash cards?

 

 

The link for sample reading is here..

https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/60943-comprehension-mastery-steps/

 

[somethingfunny]

On 3/8/2021 at 5:23 AM, 骏马的丕沿? said:

this point, I prefer that you provide copies of scientific papers, if you want to say otherwise.

Technically, as you made the initial claim it doesn’t support long-term retention, then the burden of proof is on you.

 

It might be more useful to differentiate between “rote-learning” and memorisation without understanding.

 

Flashcards are a memory aid, not a learning tool.  You won’t learn anything using flashcards, but you can remember tons.

 

Rosenshine’s principles of instruction are the current gold-standard for teachers who subscribe to a research-based methodology.  I’ll link it below, but the first principle is “begin each lesson with a brief recap of previous work”.

 

https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Rosenshine.pdf

[realmayo]

5 hours ago, Sreeni said:

Who are using flash cards

I stopped using flashcards 3 or 4 years ago, when I stopped using or studying Chinese, though I started reading again - mainly beginner-level classical texts - halfway though last year. I now use flashcards for reading & writing individual characters, simplified and traditional. And a few weeks ago I started a vocabulary deck for new words. There were maybe 4 or 5 items I didn't recognise immediately in your text, I should have known "添加剂" and could consider learning "取舍" and "推举重物" too.

[Insectosaurus]

I can recommend this lecture by Paul Nation. It's about English language learning but it's relevant to this discussion. Highly recommended.

 

The whole talk is very interesting and talks mostly about reading. For those who don't want to watch the whole thing, here he mentions flashcards.

[骏马的丕沿?]

6 hours ago, somethingfunny said:

Technically, as you made the initial claim it doesn’t support long-term retention, then the burden of proof is on you.

 

 

100% - the fact is that I am a bit sinful in this sense, and for good reason.

 

The claim that I made is a very basic and fundamental claim, and, believe it or not, is a claim that is total common knowledge outside of the context of so-called "foreigners studying a foreign language" (e.g. monolingual American college students) (and yes, before you attempt a bad refutation, it would be a dire mistake to draw a clear distinction between native-language learning methodology and foreign-language learning methodology).

 

It's like being told by a blind person to provide links to research papers when I claim, "the day sky is blue." It’s a waste of my time.

 

Anyway, I have some Chinese reading and composition to do. I can’t continue to spend a whole lot of time on this thread. I’ll be checking back in, though, this weekend!

[Moshen]

Quote

The claim that I made is a very basic and fundamental claim, and, believe it or not, is a claim that is total common knowledge outside of the context of so-called "foreigners studying a foreign language" (e.g. monolingual American college students) (and yes, before you attempt a bad refutation, it would be a dire mistake to draw a clear distinction between native-language learning methodology and foreign-language learning methodology).

 

You started a debate here by delivering some "truths" that you believe to be oracularly true because you believe them and because you believe them to be common sense.

 

It is sheer laziness and arrogance on your part now to insist that these truths are obvious and well-known when they are not.

 

Of course anyone is free to be as obstinate and irrational as they like, but don't expect the rest of us to agree with you just because you say so!

[somethingfunny]

You can’t eat your cake and have it too. Either the scientific research shows rote-learning is inefficient for storing long term information or that’s such an obvious claim that no proof is needed.

 

I think it’s bad faith to come to a Chinese language forum and say:

1. I used to use flash cards and now my Chinese is good I don’t use them anymore, so you shouldn’t use them at all.

2. You need to give me evidence to support your claims, but I don’t need to give any to support mine.

 

But yeah, I need to go and do life-saving heart surgery on homeless kittens. So I’m probably not going to respond anymore.

[Sreeni]

@somethingfunny  @骏马的丕沿

1. What is your current character & word recognition level?

2. How many words are you reviewing on average per day and how many new words you are adding now a days? How long are you using flash cards?

3. How are you mastering your context? I mean understanding Comprehension/ text?

[somethingfunny]

1. I’d say maybe a 5/7.

2. At the moment, none.  I only like to do review/flashcards if I can do it everyday. If you’re not in a position to keep it up consistently, you’re just setting yourself up for failure.

3. At the moment, I’m not mastering anything. I read stuff, then look up the bits I don’t understand.  But I don’t have a systematic plan at the moment, no not much progress.

[骏马的丕沿?]

On 3/9/2021 at 6:33 AM, Moshen said:

You started a debate here by delivering some "truths" that you believe to be oracularly true because you believe them and because you believe them to be common sense.

 

It is sheer laziness and arrogance on your part now to insist that these truths are obvious and well-known when they are not.

 

Of course anyone is free to be as obstinate and irrational as they like, but don't expect the rest of us to agree with you just because you say so!

 

Well, my job as a relatively experienced person is to give advice to others. Evidently, such advice is difficult to deliver to certain people.

 

Also, there are many, many exceptions that one could propose. Here's a valid analogy: I might make the claim, "orange juice is healthy for you." (We all know this to be generally true) But then, some being or animal, or some kind of person, who has never had a typical "human experience," and might know nothing about orange juice, will try to refute by saying: "but orange juice isn't healthy if you snort it," "it's not healthy if it's mixed with snake venom," "it's not healthy if it's expired," "it's not healthy if you drink five gallons of it in one day." And thus, the original claim that is "orange juice is healthy for you" falls apart. Perhaps excluding claims about laws of physics, the aforementioned scenario can happen with any claim.

 

When I claim, "flashcards are not healthy for you," what I'm claiming is that flashcards are not healthy IN THE WAY THAT THEY ARE TYPICALLY USED. This is crucial.

[骏马的丕沿?]

On 3/9/2021 at 6:34 AM, somethingfunny said:

I think it’s bad faith to come to a Chinese language forum and say:

1. I used to use flash cards and now my Chinese is good I don’t use them anymore, so you shouldn’t use them at all.

2. You need to give me evidence to support your claims, but I don’t need to give any to support mine.

 

 

Yeah, my Chinese is good now, and that's why I (generally) don't use flashcards anymore. I've repeated it before, and I'll repeat it again: *long-term*. Nobody is a beginner, and nobody is "not good" at Chinese, in the long-term. Flashcards are great in the beginning stages (say first few months or first two years), but are relatively inefficient after the beginning stages (i.e. in the long-term). That's my point.

 

Yes, I agree with #2 - it's bad faith. And I really don't care. I shouldn't have to argue with those who I think could use some help with study methodology about the advice that I give. If you don't like it, then don't use it. Like I mentioned just above, there are many exceptions one could make about the (very) general claim, "flashcards are unhealthy." Obviously, there is a lot to unpack here, a lot of context is needed, and a lot of exceptions can be made. And, given that many people, especially those who study L2/L3 languages, have a sort of affinity for flashcards, among other things, convincing those people that flashcards are unhealthy, in the specific way that I may claim, would take many, many weeks. Sorry, but I don't have that kind of motivation.