On flash cards

I've probably spent the bulk of my time over almost the last year practicing with flash cards. They're cheap, easily-corrected, portable, and if you lose them it's not such a big deal to copy them out again. Some people have expressed surprise that I, a computer programmer, wouldn't use some kind of computer program instead of flash cards, but none of those programs are anywhere as convenient as cards, which you can scrawl corrections on, stick in your pocket, take out while you're waiting somewhere, etc. (Sure, there are programs that run on your cell phone, but I don't want to damage my hands with hours of playing with those tiny cell phone buttons.)

I've experimented with a number of different techniques. Initially I would make cards with English on one side, Spanish on the other, so I'd have something like

ver
to see

I found it quite difficult to retain words this way. Part of the problem is just that the words lack context, and I think the human brain is very attuned to context; we learn by creating associations between different memories, and those associations strengthen both memories. The other problem is that there are different senses of the word "ver" and there are different Spanish words that have the same translation in English. For example, both "por" and "para" can be translated as "for", so then on the English side you'd have to write something like

for (in exchange for, for a certain time...)

which got quite elaborate. Generally, words learned this way were quite hard to retain and not very helpful in conversation.

For all those reasons, and based on some things I read on the Internet, I started using flash cards with phrases instead of single words. I had already noticed that using phrases helped me retain the memories better, and in many cases the phrases were things that could be used directly in conversation, things like

Mucho gusto en concercerlo(la)
Pleased to meet you

After realizing this, I went much further in memorizing phrases, and found it tremendously helpful, so started trying to memorize longer and longer phrases until I ended up working with whole paragraphs from books and from newspaper articles. At this point I realized that there it a definite limit to the usefulness of this technique. For one thing, it's very hard to memorize a whole paragraph and get every single word correct. For another thing, there's a trick of memory where you can remember things in context, but you can't remember them by themselves; think of a song that you know, and then try to think of the words in the middle of the song without singing the first line. So I would sometimes find myself hearing a word, thinking it was a new word, and then realizing that it was one I'd memorized in the middle of a long paragraph. Finally, just as a practical matter, you want to focus on the parts that you're having trouble with, and when you have a whole paragraph you are spending time reviewing parts you already know, when you should be focusing on the one or two phrases that are most troublesome.

For all these reasons, I've recently moved back towards working with shorter phrases. The balance is probably somewhere between let's say at least two or three words, which might be OK if the words are pretty unusual, and maybe ten to fifteen words if the sentence isn't too challenging and has at most a couple of troublesome words. For instance, to memorize

Los pequeños socialistas
The little socialists

would be reasonable, because it's an unusual combination.

Now, based on my extremely positive impression of Pimsleur Spanish, I practiced with the flash cards using active recall, studying the English side and translating into Spanish. I would try to get the Spanish exactly correct, even down to the word order, use of articles like "el", "la", and "un", and the exact word choice. In some cases I would need to write hints on the English side that would help me remember the word choice; for instance, in Spanish you can use either "entender" or "comprender" to mean "understand", so in some cases I would write

I didn't understand (not "e")

to indicate that the Spanish should be

No comprendí

instead of

No entendí

The other feature of Pimsleur Spanish that I tried to emulate was to use a system where the cards would be reviewed at increasing intervals. Here, there's even an advantage over Pimsleur; when using a CD, it goes in a fixed order and if you have trouble with some parts, you have to repeat the entire CD. However, with flash cards you can pull out the specific cards you had trouble with and review them more intensively, focusing your time on the most troublesome parts. I also read about several people's own flash cards systems, and eventually after a great deal of refinement I've worked out what I think is the best system for myself. It has two basic modes, but you'll see that in both cases the same idea is used: troublesome cards are identified and reviewed more frequently.

Reviewing New or Troublesome Cards — The Short Stack Technique

Let's say you're just starting out and you make some cards that you want to learn, so you start out not knowing them at all. Or, let's say you've got a stack of cards you knew at one point, but recently had trouble with and so you want to review them intensively. In this case you should take a small stack of cards, maybe 40 or 50 at the most, and keep them with you for a day or so, reviewing them whenever you get a spare moment. If you review them twice a day for a couple of minutes, that will help you remember better than a single session that's twice as long; three times a day, four times a day would be even better, assuming you're spending the same amount of time in total. That's because the brain works by putting things into short-term memory, then throwing them away after some delay. You get things into your long-term memory by recalling them after some delay, the longer the better.

Now, as you go through the stack, check how well you do on each card. If you get the card wrong, even if you're just off by one word, review the card until you can repeat the answer without looking at the Spanish side. Then put it back in the stack underneath the next card. If on the other hand you get it completely right without hesitation, put it at the bottom of the stack. And for a card that you get right with a little bit of doubt or hesitation, put it in the middle of the stack; the more doubt you had, the closer to the top you should put it. You will find that some cards need a lot more practice than others; for those cards, stick them into the stack a little higher up and you'll have a better chance of remembering them the next time. As you slowly get better at them, stick them back in further and further from the top.

In some cases you'll find that cards are almost impossible to remember. In this case you have a couple of choices. You can split the phrase up into smaller phrases on two or more new cards; if you know enough grammar, you can modify the smaller phrases to put them into more context. For instance, I'm working on Lermontov's poem "Captive", which has the lines

Я красавицу младую
Прежде сладко поцелую,

The word-for-word meaning is something like

I youngest beauty
Before-everything sweetly will-kiss

so, because of the word order, it wouldn't make much sense to split it up into individual lines. However, I was able to split it up into

Я красавицу младую поцелую
I will kiss the youngest beauty

Я прежде сладко поцелую
I will before everything sweetly kiss

which are (hopefully) grammatical and are somewhat easier to remember.

Finally, in some cases even short phrases are really hard to remember because there are so many new words. In these cases, my response is simply to add more phrases that use the problematic words. If you have trouble with прежде, for instance, look it up and add 10 new phrases that use it in different contexts. Do this for every troublesome word and by the time you come back to the troublesome phrase you will be much more able to handle it as a whole.

Reviewing Known Cards — The Chinese Box Technique

When you've reviewed your stack of 40 or 50 for a day or two, you can start to use the "Chinese Box" technique, so named because it was used by people studying Chinese characters. It's also known as the Leitner System. The basic idea here is the same; cards you know go further back, cards you have trouble with go further up. However, instead of using a single stack we'll use a number of stacks. Ideally you should have a container that lets you separate cards into several different stacks; the original technique used a wooden box with compartments, but you can do it with shoe boxes or folders or really anything with some kind of slots or compartments. I myself used plastic coupon holders that look like accordion files.

Step one should start when you have reviewed your cards several times; you want to test yourself cold, so when you haven't reviewed them for a day or so, take out the stack and go through it, but this time instead of sticking cards back into the deck, make two piles, one of cards you got right and one of cards you got wrong. Put the "right" cards into your container in a different place than the "wrong" cards. Now go back to reviewing the "wrong" cards using the "short stack" technique. When you're ready to do it again in a day or so, repeat the testing process, again putting the cards you get right into the "right" stack.

Eventually you'll run out of "wrong" cards and all your cards will be in the "right" stack. Now you should go through the "right" stack, putting wrong cards into the "wrong" stack, and making a new stack for "twice right" cards. Now put the "twice right" cards back into the container, but move them one slot up from where the "right" cards would go. Now as you review the "wrong" cards, they will graduate into the "right" stack, so eventually you'll get three stacks, "wrong", "right", and "twice right".

As you review, always focus on the "wrongest" stack; as usual, use the short stack technique on the "wrong" stack. As above, when there are no "wrong" cards, review the "right" stack. When there are only "twice right" cards, review that stack; cards you get right will go into a "thrice right" stack.

You can continue this indefinitely, but at some point you should let cards graduate into a "well-known" stack; keep this in a separate place and review everything in it once in a while just to make sure you keep everything fresh in your memory.

Some Things To Watch Out For

Let's step back and see why this would be helpful. It's the same principle as in the short stack technique and as in Pimsleur, which is that items are repeated after intervals, with the intervals increasing; however, both of these techniques improve on Pimsleur by repeating the items you have had trouble with much more frequently. The short stack and Chinese box techniques are really the same thing, but the Chinese box technique is appropriate when you need to manage hundreds of cards in a reasonable way.

Now, there are some situations you can get into where the balance isn't quite right. First, you can add too many new cards at once, or too many hard ones; then you'll sit there forever reviewing your "wrong" stack. The solution to this is to break the "wrong" stack up; take out a short stack of less than 50 and put the rest away into a "to do" stack. Then continue using only that smaller set of "wrong" cards and you'll eventually be able to clear them out of the "wrong" stack. Then you can gradually add the "to do" cards, maybe 10 to 20 per day, into the "wrong" stack.

Another problem with adding lots and lots of new cards is that you may take a really long time between reviewing cards in one of your higher-level stacks. So, be sure to allow your "wrong" stack to clear on a regular basis so you can review the higher-level stacks. Ideally you should review your complete set of cards every couple of months.