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Flashcards

Herman Ebbinghaus was the first psychologist to investigate the ability to retain information after learning it. In 1885 he derived his so-called forgetting curves from the results of his experimental work. These curves plot the amount of information remembered against the time elapsed since learning it.

This relationship can be approximately modelled as an exponential decay. With this type of curve the rate at which items are forgotten is initially relatively high, but as time progresses this rate decreases. The steepness of the curve is inversely related to the strength of memory, which is very low (giving a steep curve) for meaningless material, such as random series of letters, and very high (giving a much flatter curve) for vivid memories.

On subsequent reviews of the material being learned, the strength of memory increases and so the forgetting curve starts off again but with its slope reduced. This means that after each review the material will be retained for a longer period. This is the basis of the learning technique known as spaced repetition, in which initially material is reviewed frequently, but after each review the time until the next review is increased.

An effective way of memorising facts is to use flashcards. A question is written on one side of a card, and the answer on the other. Armed with a deck of such cards you can then review your material by looking at the front of each card in turn, mentally answering the question, then turning the card over to reveal the answer. This can be a useful approach for learning vocabulary, where words or phrases in your first language are written on one side of the cards and their counterparts in your target language on the other. Looking at the target-language side of the cards first lets you practise recognition; looking at the opposite side first lets you practise production.

Time spent learning in this way can be made much more efficient by adopting the spaced repetition approach. This strategy is aimed at optimising your learning effort by increasing the amount of time between subsequent reviews of the items with which you are familiar. A very popular flashcard-based learning system that incorporates this concept is the Leitner System, developed by Sebastian Leitner and described in his 1972 book So lernt man lernen (How to learn to learn).

In the Leitner system you have a series of groups, or card boxes, and the very process of reviewing your cards sorts them into these boxes according to how easy or difficult you find the material.

Initially all the cards in your deck are placed in box 1. When you review these if you get a card right, you promote it to box 2; if you get it wrong, it stays in box 1. And when you review the cards in box 2, correctly answered ones are promoted to box 3 and incorrectly answered ones are demoted back down to box 1. This process continues for however many boxes you have. When a card is placed in a box after being reviewed it is always added to the bottom of the pile of cards in that box.

The higher the box number, the longer the period of time you can allow between reviews. The material you know best ends up towards the far end of the series of boxes and consequently requires least time to be spent on it; whereas, the material that you need to devote most time to stays in the boxes near the start of the series, which are reviewed more frequently. You therefore do not waste time reviewing material you already know well and more time is spent on the harder to learn cases. New cards can be added into the learning system at any time. These are always initially added into box 1 and will work their way through the box set as your periodic reviews progress.

Today the Leitner system is widely used in electronic flashcard software applications. Over 200 flashcard-based-learning titles, many of which incorporate the Leitner System, are compared at the site Memorization Software Reviewed. The reviews on this site are based on comprehensive and rigorous educational principles and their top recommendation is Paul Rädle’s excellent Windows shareware product, VTrain.

At first sight this software might seem a little daunting to use, but with a prior understanding of the Leitner system and after a perusal of its built-in tutorial (Help / Tutorial), VTrain is actually very straightforward to use and it has a clean, well organised user interface giving access to its comprehensive set of features. Cards can be created and updated using the built-in editor, which supports rich text, images and voice recording. The set of boxes to be used is defined in a cardfile. When a new cardfile is created it defaults to having five boxes. The cardfile can then be filled with one or more decks of cards. New cards can be created at any time. And VTrain’s scheduling feature gives a visual indication of when cards in a box become due for review. The default review periods for boxes 2, 3, 4, and 5 are every 1 day, 2 days, 4 weeks, and 8 weeks, respectively. The cards in any given box can, however, be reviewed at any time.

VTrain provides a very flexible solution for learning virtually any subject by means of flashcards — which are, of course, an ideal method of reviewing vocabulary when learning another language.