Flashcards are powerful, but what if your flashcard deck feels more like an overgrown thicket than a carefully cultivated garden?
Do you clear away the weeds and bring it back under control, or burn it all down and start afresh?
Flashcards are a great tool for language learners. They make reviewing characters and words highly efficient and make sure you remember almost everything.
When relying on spaced repetition software, you can rapidly expand your vocabulary while maintaining what you’ve already learnt: Flashcards are great for learning Chinese.
Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#277).
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Are flashcards holding you back from learning Chinese?
When misused or overused, however, flashcards can also become a trap.
For some, learning Chinese is, to a large extent, about creating and reviewing flashcards.
The problem is that vocabulary does not exist in a vacuum, and out of context, there’s only so much flashcards can do for you.
If your flashcards stop you from engaging with the language through listening and reading, and interacting with people using Chinese, something is wrong: Flashcards are terrible for learning Chinese.
Cultivate your Chinese flashcard garden
In my opinion, the best approach is to use flashcards with purpose and an active attitude, a bit like if they were plants in a garden.
Plant – Add new characters and words that you want to learn, but don’t add everything you come across. When starting a garden, you wouldn’t plant every seed you can get your hands on. You would choose with discrimination and purpose. Do the same with flashcards! Also, don’t bulk add vocabulary from lists you find online.
Water – Review your flashcards regularly to reinforce memory and prevent forgetting. The main benefit of spaced repetition with flashcards is that it’s a great way to maintain basic knowledge of characters and words efficiently, but this only works if you use them consistently. Water your flashcard garden or it will wither and die.
Prune – Edit, update or otherwise change flashcards that are confusing, unclear or that you’re not happy with for some other reason. Depending on which app or program you use, you might have more or less control, but exercise the control you have.- Weed – Remove, suspend or ban cards you no longer find useful or just don’t like. This is essential! Think of it like this: For every card you delete, you save time you can then use to learn something more useful. There’s always an opportunity cost.
Transplant – Carefully manage what types of flashcards you use. Do you really need to learn to write all characters by hand? If not, then don’t; it will save you much time and effort. Have you tried flashcards for listening? They are super fast to review and quite fun!- Fertilise – Enrich your cards by adding context, images, example sentences, or mnemonics. If you keep notes for vocabulary or grammar, you can keep them on your flashcards. You don’t need to review this information, but it’s convenient to access when needed.
Enjoy watching it grow – If you follow the above steps, your flashcards will develop into a beautiful, peaceful garden that brings joy and satisfaction. Your vocabulary will be extensive, allowing you to speak, listen, read and write with ease.
In the best of all possible worlds, we would all be able to cultivate our flashcard gardens.
When your serene garden turns into an overgrown thicket
Unfortunately, we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, and I think nobody follows the approach outlined above.
It’s an idealised way to learn with flashcards that requires you to know a lot about flashcards, vocabulary acquisition, specific apps and yourself as a learner.
It’s unrealistic to know all this when setting out, so once you realise that many of the flashcards you added are quite useless, the set-up you use doesn’t really align with your goals, and you might be using the wrong app to boot, it’s too late.
Joy and satisfaction turn to pain and frustration
At this point, you might feel locked in.
You have thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of flashcards, but as time goes by, they become a burden.
You don’t listen to or read enough Chinese because you’re too busy reviewing flashcards.
No joy or satisfaction in sight, only pain and frustration.
You might also find yourself in this situation if you take a break from flashcards. Just like with a garden, you will discover that things have gotten out of hand while you were away: weeds have crept in, plants have grown wild and tangled, and pests may have taken hold.
Once your garden has turned into a thicket, you have two options:
- Adopt an aggressive attitude toward your flashcard garden
- Burn it all down and start afresh
The second option is not as bad as it seems. Let’s have a look!
Burn it all down and start afresh
Deleting all flashcards and starting from scratch sounds like a radical approach, and it is, but it’s the right decision in many cases.
I used to be very against resetting my flashcards, but I’ve done so several times and don’t regret it at all. In fact, I should have done it earlier. I had almost 30,000 unique flashcards in Anki, but I have never regretted abandoning them.
Starting over has several advantages:
- You spend time learning Chinese, not editing flashcards
- You’re reviewing instead of agonising over how to manage your vocabulary
- You free up time for listening and reading, which are much more important
- You can switch apps to something more suitable to your needs (if you want to)
- You wake up from the nightmare: learning Chinese is not just about flashcards
- You can enjoy learning characters and words again
For more about a balanced approach to learning Mandarin and the role of flashcards, please refer to Analyse and balance your Chinese learning with Paul Nation’s four strands.
Analyse and balance your Chinese learning with Paul Nation’s four strands
Why burning down your flashcard garden feels wrong
Many learners, including myself, hesitate to delete their flashcard decks because of the time and effort they’ve already put in.
It can feel like erasing a personal archive of progress, especially when apps track stats that seem to measure learning.
But your knowledge of Chinese is not measured by how many flashcards you’ve learnt. It’s a convenient number that makes progress visible, but that’s it!
Flashcards are a means to an end, not the end itself. If a deck is no longer helping you engage meaningfully with Chinese, then holding on to it for sentimental or statistical reasons is not good.
Why burning everything down and starting afresh is still recommended
The most common fear is that deleting flashcards will delete your memory of those characters and words.
This is clearly nonsense; your knowledge of vocabulary resides in your brain, not in a flashcard app. It’s true that you risk forgetting some words that only appear in your flashcards (and not when you read or listen), but then the question is: Do you really need those words?
Generally speaking, there’s no need to be afraid of losing important vocabulary. If it is important, it will show up when you listen, speak, read and write.
As mentioned, if they don’t show up, they probably aren’t as important as you thought. And nothing stops you from adding words again if you need to.
If you’re even considering resetting your flashcards, you should probably do it. And even if you don’t, you should at least think about it!
Don’t delete everything; save your rare blooms
While resetting your flashcard app is often the right choice (see above), there are some caveats we need to discuss.
Most importantly, there might be vocabulary that is particularly important to you as an individual.
Perhaps it relates to a hobby, profession or life situation. These are words you’ve collected over time and that matter to you, even if you don’t use them every day and don’t encounter them often when listening and reading.
For example, when I practised gymnastics in Taiwan, I wrote down dozens of highly specialised vocabulary, such as names of specific exercises, techniques, equipment and so on. In other cases, they were more general sports vocabulary that is essential for interacting with other gymnasts or coaches.
It would be stupid to delete these flashcards as long as they are relevant. They were hard to come by, unique to me and certainly did not appear in texts I read or recorded audio I listened to.
Some parts of your garden are rooted in your app
Another situation where it makes sense to think twice before deleting everything is if you’ve spent a lot of time collecting good and personal example sentences, vocabulary notes, supporting images and the like.
This essentially means that my argument above that you can always re-add words later doesn’t fully apply, so some extra caution is warranted.
In some apps, such as Skritter, information that you personalise for each vocabulary item is saved, so if you add a custom definition to a word, ban the word and then add it back in, you’ll still have your old information left.
If the app you use doesn’t work like that (and most don’t), deleting a lot of curated information can be bad.
Still, don’t overvalue your own notes. Things you wrote down as a beginner are rarely useful at an intermediate level, and good example sentences should be easy to access in any good app.
Finally, in many apps, such as Anki, you can just suspend all your old flashcards and start afresh; no need to actually delete them.
Conclusion: Cultivate your Chinese flashcard garden… or burn it down and start afresh?
Flashcards are a powerful learning tool, but only when they serve your goals, not the other way around. If your deck has become a burden, it might be time to start over.
If you don’t feel that you have time to engage directly with the language outside of flashcard apps, you need to take action.
Cultivate your garden if you can, burn it down if you must, but either way, don’t get bogged down in flashcards.
