Do you find digital flashcards (like Anki) or physical flashcards easier to study?

24 comments

1. i prefer physical, the act of making them and organizing them is part of the studying process

   tho ymmv, this is a very personal, subjective thing, do whatever works for you, though i would suggest trying whatever method one has not, just to see how it feels and works. sometimes what works changes over the course of your studies and what wasn’t helpful before becomes helpful, so constant experimentation and re-evaluation is key

2. My Anki deck has thousands of cards, physical cards aren’t viable on that scale. It’s a matter of practicality much more than preference.

3. I can see the appeal of physical. But…

   I like hearing the pronunciation, having hover-over furigana, and having 9000 flashcards, all hard with physical.

   Also not having to sort 9000 flashcards, having SRS tell me what to study, is good too.

4. I used to use paper flashcards. I would put a Japanese word on one side, and an English word on the other. I would go through the whole deck every day. I had to move beyond this, though.

   * when I memorized all the jouyou kanji, I reached thousands of cards, and doing the whole deck every day was impossible
   * I started using sentences rather than words on the flashcards, and it became difficult to fit entire sentences on paper cards
   * and (well after I switched to using an SRS) I started putting audio in the cards, which is obviously impossible on paper

   I believe hardly anyone does this, but I still write down the answer on paper in Japanese every single time I review a card.

   I’ve tried using Anki a few times but it never took. I’ve been using Mnemosyne instead.

5. I personally use both for a few reasons.

   Generally it goes like this:

   Write up new cards

   Add them to a deck of about 80 to study

   Once I get confident with a word, remove it from the physical deck and add it to the SRS program.

   I like physical cards at the beginning for a few reasons:

   I can do them over and over

   I can split out cards I’m struggling with and then add them back

   I can jump around to check what a specific word is before or after it “came up”

   I like the software just because then I don’t need to keep track of all the words I need to remember. Just do the thing and you won’t forget any (too much at least).

   The physical cards aren’t the limiting factor. I’m at about 1,000 words and the stack of cards is just a few inches. 10,000 is a pretty advanced vocab and that would fit in a shoebox.

   Organizing which cards to review which day and not forgetting any is the struggle.

   The other BIG benefit to this system is that I’ve reviewed all my vocab in multiple systems, so I don’t only recognize it in the context of one software or a specific color card.

6. I personally use digital flashcards for vocab and physicsl flashcards for kanji. This is mainly due to the fact that I study kanji by writing them down instead of simple recognition.

   The physical flashcards help me to stay a bit more concentrated compared to studying on my phone (usually the #1 distraction device), and for kanji the number of flashcards get very high, but not absurdly high like with vocab.

7. I never tried physical flashcards, but I don’t think it’s feasible to have more than a 1000, as I have on Anki.

8. I use a mix of both, and it’s always funny how digital-only users manufacture problems in their heads. There are actually many solutions to the problems people are talking about here.

   9,000 full sized index cards are certainly going to take up too much space and be hard to organize, but ninety pocket-sized rings of 100 mini flashcards could fit into a single box and would be organized automatically into the rings.

   You could also just use a notebook as your flash card tool. Words on one side, definitions on the other, cover the side you want to study. Or just read it to review on the train. A single campus notebook has 1800 lines, so you can fit a lot into a small space. Vocabulary notebooks are a staple of language learning worldwide.

   Is it the act of writing those cards that you prefer? AnkiSnap and SmaTan are designed for that.

9. I much prefer physical flash cards because I prefer to have the control over how I memorise them (flip back and forth between a few, shuffle them around etc) but i have around 700 now and will have to face the fact that anki is probably the smarter way to go. Although I may still learn new vocab with physical and then use anki for spaced repetition

10. I use a flashcard app for quantity reasons alone + im not often at my desktop for Anki. Totally get how physical flash cards work better for you – they do for me too. Somethings I’ll make a small physical deck of 20 cards for stuff I REALLY need to hunker down on/study.

11. Something to be said for the experience of actually writing flash cards as a memory aid.

12. I know that this isn’t related to the question op asked but i dont understand why everyone just goes right into flashcards whenever they try learning Japanese i mean sure i guess it’s faster (?) But you can do many other things and also learn the language like reading books and just consuming japanese content in general..

13. I only remember words through physical flash cards. I find that if I review a card every day for a week, then seeing it through immersion from that point on is usually enough to keep me from forgetting it, otherwise it’s a word I’m not actively using, and I don’t really need to memorize it right now. So I make a group of flash cards, study them for a week (usually about 1-200 cards) and then put them away and make a new set.

14. My Anki deck doesn’t have the translations, only the reading on the back. I have a physical list of all translations (they’re separated by category, like verbs, adjectives, etc) so I check the physical list on the first days after I start a new deck, but I leave it aside after some time.

15. It makes sense to separate the learning & reviewing processes.

    https://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm

    I can imagine flashcard best practices vary by person, vocab book v. vocab from the wild, just reading or also writing kanji…

    In language school, I found making and reviewing physical flashcards a great way to learn reading and writing kanji of say 25 words per day from the kanji textbooks. We had a daily quiz which probably took less than 30 minutes to make cards and memorise everything.

    Physical cards become overwhelming for longer-term reviewing. And timing reviews became somewhat haphazard (I made green, yellow and red stacks). So I slowly added the words to SRS with a sentence for context and retired the paper cards.

    – I had some nice hover-over furigana but eventually killed that to simplify things.

    – I used to test translation Japanese to English but deleted those cards as a waste of time.

16. I prefer Anki because I can have hundreds (or thousands) of flashcards in my pocket.

17. Honestly, I don’t use flashcards.Why would I go through the same sentences/dictionary entries over and over again, when I could simply read stuff and see a variety of uses in context (which is basically how I already mastered another foreign language).

    Like, if you want to make sure you are seeing stuff often enough, there is Satori Reader for example, where the stories are written in such a way that certain words/phrases/grammar points get repeated in multiple chapters in a story, but in different contexts.

18. just srs your cards irl

19. I like physical. Using an electronic device can open the door for distraction. Also, if you make your own physical cards, you have the advantage of having to write everything down, at least once. I find that part to be very helpful for my memory.

    In reality, when I’m using flashcards(it’s been awhile since they’ve been a part of any language practice I’ve been doing, due to laziness), I use both.

20. Oh wow, I can share my horror story

    When I was studying in Japan (like 8 years ago, oh god) I did RTK as Heisig recommends. I went out and bought like 3,000 paper flashcards, keyword on the front and kanji/story/number on the back. I even got a bunch of little boxes and made a sort of primitive SRS system.

    I used my winter vacation to power through RTK and within about 6 weeks had made all ~3,000 cards. It wasn’t convenient but it wasn’t unmanageable, either — I was going through a few hundred cards per day, so I’d split my boxes up into multiple decks… take one around with me in the morning, swap the deck after lunch, etc, and just flip through them a I was walking or waiting on class to start.

    Then one day I tripped while getting dressed and knocked all of shoeboxes off the desk and sent all 3,000 cards flying. I quit doing paper flashcards that day.

    —

    I prefer Anki for the convenience, but I do like to use paper cards in the very beginning. I find that my retention rate is terrible for the first couple hundred words and it is particularly difficult to learn numbers. So I make physical flashcards for those. I like physical flashcards because it’s easier to cram them — I’ll just beat the hell out of them for a couple weeks till they stick, then move onto Anki.

21. In using both for hakana and katakana. I don’t know which will be more effective to help imprint the images in my mind, so I’m going with the whole hog ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

22. I’m too lazy to make physical ones and high chance I’ll lose them somewhere. Anki on the other hand spoils me

23. Physical flashcards sound great for maybe leech words or something you want to be able to output soon

24. None of the above. Literally never used a single flashcard, digital or otherwise, in all my years studying the language, and now I’m a professional interpreter/translator who is a published author in Japanese.

    There are many ways to accomplish the same goal. No need to do what everyone else does.