Flashcard Mania - Super Sets
The saying goes that you will forget as quickly as you memorize. That is true.
We’re very familiar with the intensive Latin and Greek courses offered during the summer all over the world. Everybody gives the same advice: don’t do it unless you’re going straight into a reading course in the fall. Otherwise, you’ll forget everything before the end of the semester.
We like working with massive sets of flashcards. They tend to have more than 1,000 items. We have one that is close to 3,000 items, in fact. We can learn them because we have the time, and we do it slowly. But how does one optimize the learning process for those short on time?
An optimized learning process consists of two things 1) the learning of the items in a relatively short amount of time, and 2) the ability to test oneself on the entire set in a reasonable amount of time.
If it takes about 5 minutes to properly learn an item, then learning 1000 items will take 83 hours, not including reviews; and you have to review. If you do not review at some point along the way, you risk forgetting the first items you learned. Reviewing adds to the time spent. If it takes about 5 seconds to review a flashcard (reading it, coming up with an answer, and flipping it over to verify it), then it takes a minute to review 12 flashcards. That’s fine; but once you get to the last 50 flashcards -and there are 4 hours for you to forget a couple of items- and you have to turn back to review, you will take you over an hour, about 79 minutes, to review the ones you learned, at best. If you are working with a set of 2136 flashcards, the size of the Jōyō Kanji set, before you study your last set of 100, you have to spend almost 3 hours reviewing. Worse yet, assuming you do at one point have all the flashcards learned and memorized, you have to make the time for the next few months to review them every day (or every other day). Perhaps that is not so bad when you just need one hour, but finding 3 hours a day is very difficult.
That would be one method. Alternatively, perhaps the proper form of working it is to learn the large set in subsets (in fourths or eighths or tenths) and then simply read the learned flashcards after they’re memorized, even if it is slower overall. This means just reading the front and back. That would take about 3 seconds. This doesn’t look like much, but in a set of 1000 Kanji that is at least 33 minutes less than if one had to produce an answer (or worse: type in an answer.) Presumably, if one is very consistent with one’s reviews, once everything has been learned, and one can speed up that reviewing process, and one does so twice a day, by the end of a year everything should be up there in one’s active memory.
In any case, even with this alternative method, one has to test oneself at some point with the entire set, and anything you get wrong you have to mark as needing to be reviewed in a special manner.
We bring up the subject in a general manner, but if we look at it from the perspective of Kanji, two peculiarities come up. Firstly, it is truly superior to learn Kanji by writing them than by merely identifying them. That is to say, it is better to read the side of the flashcard that says “cat” and write “猫” rather than to read the side that says “猫” and say (or write) “cat.” Secondly, unless you are learning Kanji in a vacuum and you aren’t reading any Japanese, you will probably come across two or three “meanings” of Kanji (if you are doing a Kanji-meaning) set. For example, “創” can mean both “wound” or “genesis,” which seem like antonyms.
(On a third note, there are some Kanji in the Jōyō Kanji set that are there largely because they are used in names, such as “野” and “田,” but we often fail to point that out. It is not a bad idea to question whether or not, in this case, the meanings are all that relevant.)
To address the first point, on a psychological level, there is a significant level of relaxation and security that comes from extensive familiarity with Kanji, even if one cannot write them perfectly. It’s much easier on the mind to learn to write Kanji one knows the meaning of or can read than it is to do so with Kanji one has never seen before. On the second point, for the sake of learning meanings, it appears perfectly suitable to just learn one meaning and stick with it. Most people are not so dense so as to not accept multiple meanings once they get to learning vocabulary.
One last matter to bring up is three-sided flashcards. They are highly impractical to make in real life, but they can be made digitally. This is rather simple. In Japanese, where there Kanji serves as an overlay to Kana, there would be a good reason to use three-sided flashcards having Kanji/Okurigana - Kana - First-language translation. But would it be worthwhile to create a Kanji - Chinese Reading - Native Reading - Meaning flashcard, a 4-sided flashcard? We believe not, but maybe we’re wrong.
Food for thought.