What are flashcards and should you use them?

In this post, you can find out what flashcards are, how to use them and why you should use them. Even if you know what flashcards are, I think you'll learn something new from this ; ).

What are they and how to use them?

Picture yourself holding a larger than usual Pokémon trading card in your hand. Now imagine the front of the card has a question written down and the back has the answer to that question. Maybe the question was really complex, tricky and was guaranteed to come out for the exam so you wanted to remember it. Or, the question could have even been as simple as “What are the 8 planets in our system?” (this was my first flashcard) but you still needed to memorize it. That’s what a flashcard look like. But, to get the most out of our flashcards, we should incorporate spaced repetition into them.

How do we space out our flashcard repetitions? Well, its quite easy, and don’t worry about the words ‘spaced repetition’ for now. Whenever you study a card for the first time, there’s a high chance you won’t be able to answer it correctly. So then what do you do? You don’t want to put it back into the deck for another day, you still can’t recall everything. At the same time, you don’t want to study cards that are easy as often as the hard ones, it would be inefficient. 🤔

So to solve his problem and set up your flashcards, first create 5 boxes 🗃. The first box is labelled again, the second is labelled tomorrow, the third is 4 days, the fourth is next week, and finally, the fifth is 2 weeks. Whenever you make a card, put it in the tomorrow box. These boxes represent how often you review a card. So, for example, cards in the 4 days box are studied every 4 days, cards in the tomorrow box are studied every day, cards in the again box are studied until there are no more and cards in the next week box are studied every week.

Now that we’ve finished setting up everything, let’s find out how to study the flashcards. Here is the step by step process of studying with flashcards, no matter which box you’re studying.

1. Take a card from the box(es) you’re going to review today at random.

2. Read the questions.

3. Answer the question in your head or on paper if it helps.

4. Flip the card over and read the answer.

5. Compare your answer to the real answer

6. If your answer was wrong, move the card to the ‘again’ box.

7. If the question was difficult but you still managed to answer it, put it back in the same box you took it out of.

8. If you could answer it, move it to the next box

9. Repeat this process until you’ve finished reviewing all the cards in the box(es) and there are no cards left in the again box.

So, as you can see, its kind of like a card game. Who would have known you can have fun while studying. Not only that, studying with flashcards is fast too, I mean, its called flash-card, flash as in you can pick up a card and answer it in a flash. But to some, it may seem hard to manage and organize or hard to know when to study which box. Don’t worry, there’s a solution for this too!

Introducing, flashcard apps. My personal favourite is Anki but you can also use others like Quizlet. These flashcard apps automatically organize and plan out when you should review your cards based on algorithms. Because of this, they are faster too. However, flashcard apps do take away some of the fun since apps like Anki don’t even have cards, just questions and answers. I personally use digital flashcard apps most of the time because I can’t organize anything well enough, but you can choose whichever way you feel is best for you.

So, should you use flashcards?

Yes, but as an addon to your studying.

As a whole, I think you should use flashcards, but I don’t think they should replace your current study method. Flashcards can’t cover everything you’re trying to learn, unless maybe you create hundreds of them but then they’ll get quite hard to organize and manage, even if you’re using apps. However, flashcards are really useful if you’re trying to memorize something so that you’ll never forget it. And, they’re so quick and easy to study, that you don’t need to really focus or get prepared to study them. All in all, flashcards make studying fun and fast.

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Thanks for reading!

This has been Arjun from the blog Not Too Young, I hope you learnt something new from this post and can improve your studying. As always, if you liked the post, consider sharing it or subscribing to our blog it would be really helpful! Also, don’t forget to leave a comment if you have any suggestions or catch some errors. Hopefully, we can see you around next time, thanks again!