Why flashcards are not enough

Credit where it is due

If you have gone past the gamified apps, you have probably ended up with a flashcard deck. Spaced flashcards are genuinely good: they schedule reviews by how well you know each card, they ask you to recall rather than recognise, and they scale to thousands of items. For dates, capitals and chemical formulas they are close to the best method there is. Most people who reach a high level in a language with self-study have a deck somewhere in the story.

And most of them also have a textbook, a grammar reference, a tutor and a notebook of sentences, because the deck alone was not getting them to speak. The gaps are not in the scheduling. They are in what a card can hold.

A card is one thing in isolation

A flashcard says city on one side and grad on the other. You see the front, you say the back, you grade yourself. Fine. Now try to say in the city, from the city, the cities, to the cities. The card taught you the dictionary form. Every sentence you will ever say needs one of the others.

You can make a card for every form, and some people do. Then you have fourteen cards for one noun, each tested alone, none tested where it lives: after a preposition, next to an adjective that has to agree with it, in a sentence whose meaning tells you which form is right. Knowing that the locative of grad is gradu is a fact. Producing gradu without thinking because you are saying where something is, is a skill. Cards test the fact.

You are the grader, and you are generous

A flashcard cannot check your answer. You flip it, compare, and decide: did I know that? Everyone who has used a deck knows what happens next. You said gradu when the card wanted grada; that was nearly right, click good. You remembered the word a second after flipping; that counts, click good. The schedule then pushes the card weeks away on the strength of an answer you did not actually give.

A sentence you type is graded by the check, not by you. Either the form is there or it is not, and a wrong ending is never nearly right.

Cards do not know about grammar

Even a perfect deck of every form of every word tests words. Grammar, the thing that decides which form goes where, has no card. You can make a card that says locative after u and na and recite the rule on the back, and that tests whether you can recite the rule, which is not what fails when you speak. What fails is the application, inside a sentence, under time pressure, while your attention is on the meaning.

The only exercise that tests grammar is producing a sentence that needs it. Then the question is whether the system can tell which rule failed when the sentence is wrong. A card cannot, because a card has one answer. A sentence check that knows every word's rule can.

Someone has to make the cards

A deck you build yourself is built in the order you happen to meet words, with the translations you happened to look up, without pictures unless you add them and without audio unless you find it. Making a good card takes minutes; making a thousand takes the hours you meant to spend learning. Shared decks solve the labour and bring their own problem: they were made for someone else's course, in someone else's order, with mistakes nobody has fixed.

What has to sit around the card

The course keeps the part of the flashcard idea that works. Every word, every form of a word and every grammar rule is its own item with its own level, reviewed when it is due and pushed further away each time you get it right. That is spaced repetition, applied to three kinds of thing instead of one.

Everything else is different. An item is never tested alone: it is tested inside a sentence you write from scratch, and the check reads every word, marks the one that broke and names the rule behind it. The grading is not yours to do. A word arrives as a card already made, with a picture, a voice, the translation, every form and a sentence you have already met. And the order is not the order you happened to meet things in; it is the order of the course, one rule at a time, with the words that rule needs.

If you have a deck, keep it for the things decks are good at. For the language itself, the card has to be a sentence.