As has been pointed out to me, I tend toward the most boring possible hobbies. Even before I got into dried beans, my interests included oatmeal, filing systems, composting, drone music. So it may surprise no one that when I set out to refresh my french reading skills I got a bit obsessed with a spaced repetition study app. Aka, flashcards. I’m really into digital flashcards now, you guys.
Clicking through a set of flashcards that are automatically calibrated so that you can get most but not all of them right is about as addictive as scrolling through social media, but instead of making you anxious it makes you, e.g., understand french. Like drone music and composting, flashcards are secretly quite exciting.
I thought I’d post a few flashcard resources since, for real, this keeps coming up in real life. Maybe you too want to learn a language or study for some kind of test?
- An overview of how spaced repetition study fits into an overall language learning project. This is approximately the method I follow for increasing my french skills.
- Video tutorials on using the Anki SRS app for language learning, by the author of that overview.
- 20 best practices for making flashcards, based on both common sense and recent science.
- Background on the principles behind SRS. Short version: if you get a flashcard right, it shows up less often; if you get it wrong it shows up more often. Ideally, this reminds you about each thing just before you are about to forget it.
Maybe you just want to quit the book of faces and need something else to do on the bus. You could make flashcards to memorize all your friends’ birthdays; then you really won’t need Facebook 😉
