Flashcards - What's Useful, What's Not?

[ChTTay]

How many of you use full sentence flashcards?

At the moment I only do words and single characters. I put all characters into Pleco and use Skritter for HSK vocab as well as my writing class vocab.

However, I find SRS using words/characters doesn't cross over well when i am speaking / trying to converse.

I was considering either adding example sentences to some key words in Pleco or just making a stand alone sentence flashcard. I do actually make grammar/language custom cards already from my text books but there are not that many of these.

As much as sentence cards might help, I don't want to get bogged down with making them...

Any advice or thoughts appreciated! ?!?

[Northern_Lights]

I am still in the single word/phrase phase of learning. I find making the flash card myself does wonders to learning as well. Which is why I use both homemade flash cards plus ones that I found in the app store .

[count_zero]

I use physical flashcards - ie something that is made of actual card. Look at the card and try to guess the pinyin. Then look on the back to see if I'm right. If I am it goes in one pile; if not, another. After I've gone through them a few times I find that I also magically know the meaning too - my eyes have been flicking down to pick that up.

This way, it's actually quite relaxing and enjoyable going through them rather than trying to remember the pinyin, tone and meaning which makes my stomach tie itself up in a knot.

Using this method I used to be able to put into my short-term memory 50 characters a day. Now I have about 2500 - 3000 cards and their meaning is getting very abstract I think their usefulness is at an end. I think the next stage for me is lots and lots of reading.

[Flare]

I too find (re)learning many new single word/phrase can get tedious. To give it more meaning I ask my teacher to prepare example sentences for the new vocabulary during class which I then add to my Pleco custom dictionary.

The other thing that I find very helpful is to add a mnemonics for single words using the Matthews and Matthews approach (after finishing MM I continued with Heisig but used the MM approach). For multiple character words and phrases I also note down a short mnemonic. The mnemonics stories I upload to Pleco in a separate custom dictionary which I can access during a flashcard review in case I forget a word. I found http://www.hackingchinese.com to have a lot of good common sense advice on learning strategies and building strong mnemonics.