In my case, I didn’t use them for a long time with Spanish. Then I found I couldn’t think of words in Spanish very easily even though I could recognize them when reading. I found Production cards quite useful once I finally implemented them, but it doesn’t seem to be as helpful for the new words that I’m coming across and adding for Japanese.
I’m still having quite a bit of trouble producing words when I do italki sessions for Japanese, especially compared to when I was early in practicing speaking Spanish so I still use production vocab cards in addition to recognition for that. Obviously I’m still going to keep practicing speaking, but I’m debating on whether to keep production cards. I get the impression they at least help a bit with recognition as well, and vice versa, but to a small extent.
How about you guys?
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Personally, no. What I found useful was a mixture of what I call “[attentive listening](https://morg.systems/Learning-to-Output#attentive-listening)”, “[self-corrected writing](https://morg.systems/Learning-to-Output#self-corrected)” (especially with a focus on trying to use certain words methodically), and just conversation practice in a natural environment (as in, not role-playing scenarios) and with people I “relate” with (in age and interests) for the purpose of talking (not “to learn Japanese”).
All of this only after I had enough intuition for how the language worked naturally/subconsciously after thousands of hours of input (not that I actively avoided output, just that until then my output was extremely painful/unpleasant and those techniques mentioned above wouldn’t work)