When I say flashcards, one of two things probably pop into your head:

1. Oh hell yeah, you mean like Anki?!

2. Oh hell no, never again

People tend to have a visceral reaction to flashcards. They’re normally incredibly tedious — but if you can stick with it long enough, the rewards are invaluable.

In this article I want to talk about three things: what Phrasing does differently to make flashcards enjoyable, what Phrasing does to make flashcards effective, and what you can do to maximize their effectiveness.

You learn worse when you’re stressed

If you’ve doen flashcards before, you probably remember a lot of tedium and stress. Whether by hand or with an app like Anki, the process of creating the cards is long and manual. Then when it comes to reviews, it’s stressful and anxiety inducing.

Phrasing takes care of both these items:

• Expressions can be made in a single click, and come with voice, grammar, and morphology. They’re automatically connected to a larger interconnected web of words and phrases in the language, and are ready to be reviewed seven ways till Sunday. Plus, they look gorgeous.

• Our 🔗 Humane Spaced Repetition makes reviews stress free, and dare I say downright addicting.

These are more than just conveniences — they’re necessary. If you’re showing up every day to do flashcards, forcing yourself to do it and grinding through an activity that you actively dislike, you will objectively learn less. That’s not to disparage ‘the grind’ — hard work is required to learn a language, and every hour is beneficial, whether you feel like it or not. However, any stressors you remove will not only improve your quality of life, but improve the amount you learn.

How Phrasing can teach you more with flashcards

In addition to removing the stress & tedium, Phrasing is build from the ground up to maximize the benefit of flashcards. The following three things are applicable for any flashcards you do (not just Phrasing), but we automate these for every expression so you don’t have to think about it.

Sentence cards

You should always be studying words in full sentences. If you’re doing any sort of flashcards that are anything like What is the French word for dog? Chien then stop! These are a massive waste of time.

You need to be learning words in context. You should always be studying full sentences, never naked words. Phrasing’s Expressions do this automatically, turning every word of every expression into learning candidates.

Encoding & retrieval variability

There are two aspects to memory, encoding and retrieval. You can think of encoding as saving a document — especially the part where you try to come up with a name you’ll remember and choose a folder to put it in. Similarly, retrieval is the process of trying to remember which folder you put it in, and what the heck you decided to name it.

You want to expose yourself to these items in as many different ways as possible. From the encoding variability, this means you’ll want to just see the text, you’ll want to just hear the audio, you’ll want to hear the audio and see the text together. You’ll want to read grammar explanations and plan English breakdowns, chunk expressions into sentences, phrases, and words. Try to examine the sentence from as many angles as possible — all of which Phrasing provides to you in a beautiful interface.

For retrieval variability, Phrasing offers multiple review modalities, from clozewords (spelling) to flashcards (prompted recall) to shadowing (recognition) to free recall (unprompted recall)

Semantic linking

When using flashcards, it’s nearly impossible to stop your brain from looking for the simplest shortcuts to remember a card. Your brain will remember the size and position of the text box, to some random word in the sentence, or even the order with which you see the cards — anything to avoid actually thinking about the language.

Phrasing does away with all of this by randomizing all of those parameters, so you can’t latch onto them. But we go one step further — add multiple expressions with the same word, and we’ll link them together. Now when you review that word, we’ll intelligently choose the best option to make sure you are actually learning.

How you can make the most of flashcards

Wether you use Phrasing or not, these are my tips to get the most out of flashcards:

Story cards

There is a huge difference in recall for random sentences (like those generated by AI) vs sentences that come directly from your favorite movie, tv show, book, podcast, song, etc. Our brains are hard wired for stories, and hard wired for language as a tool of communication. Using sentences that are part of a story you love will give your brain a reason to remember them.

Phrasing of course words with Materials to create expressions automatically from your favorite stories.

Interleaving

If you’re learning multiple languages, mixing up the decks can result in a huge increase in amount of recall, ability to discern between languages, and improve applicability (the chances you’ll be able to use what you learned in context). See my article 🔗 Learning Multiple Languages  to dig into the science.

Phrasing of course supports interleaving out of the box. Just tell us how much of each language you want to study, and we’ll intelligently balance the rest.

Time

The biggest benefit of spaced repetition is time. While language acquisition is great, I always liken it to digging into sand. I can feel what I learned slipping through my fingers. I can feel the hole I’ve dug caving in.

Spaced repetition on the other hand will embed items into your memory for life. If you give any spaced repetition enough time (1-3 years), you will learn 90% of what you study to an insane degree. Even if it’s decades down the line, you can close your eyes and recall a large, large majority of what you learned.

You only have to do this active recall in context a handful of times before a word will enter your active vocabulary, and be ready to be used.

The biggest benefit of spaced repetition is not about improving your vocabulary today, tomorrow, or even next month — but increasing your vocabulary a year from now, 10 years from now, or even for the rest of your life.