So I’ve been using flashcards for like 1.5 years now which isn’t a lot but it definitely always felt like a great method for studying pretty much anything that you are capable of simplifying into a small double sided card but especially recently I noticed that I began to get worse with remembering the cards and I didn’t know what I was doing wrong and just assumed I’m getting tired from studying daily but I don’t study a lot and it worked very fine in the past so I wasn’t satisfied with the answer. I then came up with a theory that you could describe as followed:
The volume of studying or the amount of time you have to spend to study an amount of flashcards depends on 2 factors:
1. The quantity of (the same) flashcards you review in a certain amount of time and
2. The quality of actually recalling the content of the card
The quality would be trying hard to actually recall the cards content before looking at it’s solution.
You could maybe write that as Volume = Quantity \* Quality
Now what I apparently recently fell into is a trend in which I focussed on the quantity of reviewing a certain amount of cards in a shorter amount of time because I thought the mere increase in exposure to many cards would help me to remember things more quickly and not waste time trying to recall that one card for like 10-20 seconds. Now that I noticed that this might be the problem I tried to reverse that tendency by only focussing on trying as hard as possible to remember the cards as soon as I see them.
To make this more clear compare this: You study new flashcards and after seeing a new card once, the next time you see the card you will take your time to try to recall that card instead of giving up after 5 seconds instead of thinking “nah I don’t know anymore” and looking at the answer. Each time you now see a card you will take as much time as you need (that doesn’t exceed like 30 seconds or so since after that time you probably can’t recall the card yet) to remember the card. Then you just repeat every card until you can recall it in about under 5 seconds or less.
Doing that first of all made me remember a new card after seeing it on average twice or thrice instead of an average of 8 times when skipping more quickly and not properly trying to remember things as well as keeping the then newly learned words for a lot longer than if I were to do it the other way around.
I don’t know if this is helpful to anyone but I thought since it was helpful to me right now I might as well share the experience