I am a fan of using flashcards, and I have used paper ones and electronic ones. I like them both. When I was in Mexico, I did some articles about using them. Here is a list of them, taken right off my sitemap.

If you click on the first link, you will go to a page that shows the beginnings of the articles, so you can read a bit and then click through on the ones that interest you. Or just guess from the titles here and go right to them.

• Category: Flash Cards
  • Anki: A Popular Free Spanish Flash Card Program
  • Flash Card Programs and Your Memory
  • Mnemosyne: A Free Spanish Flash Card Program
  • Now I Am Liking Physical Flash Cards More
  • Oops, Been Bogging Down on Flashcards
  • Spanish Flash Card Programs: An Overview
  • Tackling Past Tense Verbs with Flash Card Programs
  • VTrain Flashcard Software: A Review

Whatever you do to work on your Spanish, do include flashcards and remember more of what you have learned. My free ebook, available in the sidebar of this page, explains more of how things move from short-term to long-term memory.

Remember Your Spanish with Flashcards is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

I’ve written about using flash cards for learning Spanish before, but most of that has been about using inexpensive or free programs that you can use on your computer. (Scroll down and click on Flash Cards in the sidebar to see those articles.)

Today I want to make a case for using physical flash cards… as well as, or instead of, the computer kind.

Why? Because I consider all  flash cards to be an important tool in remembering what you have studied or heard someplace. Physical ones have some benefits I will mention shortly.

The way our memories work, if we review a new word or phrase at increasing intervals,  we have a far better chance of its entering our long-term memories than if we don’t review it. Now that I have more gray hair than brown, I really notice the benefits of reviewing, but this concept is true at all ages.

Language scholars have varying ideas about how often you should review, and some of these ideas are worked into the computer programs. In a nutshell, here is a simple scheme that you can use:

Suppose I learn a new word on Wednesday morning,  when I am out at the Ajijic tianguis (street market). If  I scribble the word in my little notebook, that’s already going to help me remember it. If I get home and later that day, I put the word into my flash cards, that’s another repetition. In these two cases, the act of writing the word also helps me remember it.

(It also happens that I don’t get around to putting the word into flash cards till after some time has passed and some more words have made it into the notebook. Such is life.)

Then it would be good for me to review it on Thursday. If I have it pretty firmly by then, I would take it out of my LEARNING category and put it in my REVIEWING category, which I would be going through once or twice a week. When I felt like I really had it, the word would go into the KNOW category, which gets reviewed about once a month.

So Why Physical Cards?

This summer, while I was on vacation and didn’t have my computer on much, I noticed how many odd moments there were when I could have picked up some cards and done a few of them. Now that we’ve been home in Mexico for about a month, my computer is on all day — but I am noticing that my wrist does get sore from all the mouse-clicking. So I am trying to moderate my computer time according to how the wrist feels. That’s what got me back to the cards.

As the picture shows, I use an old checkbook box which I filled with index cards cut to size. I made three cards taller and put on them Learning, Reviewing, and Know. So I grab a handful of cards and sort them into the three categories, then put them back in place.  Remember to use both sides of the card, the English and the Spanish.

Umm… hadn’t done this in over year. Blush to realize how many of the words in the Know category I had forgotten entirely. But then I haven’t needed the word for raccoon! But if raccoons come up in conversation sometime soon, I bet el mapache will roll easily off my tongue!

Several years ago, when we were living in the US, at a yard sale I got a commercially made box of 1,000 cards. I worked some with them but I do find that the act of making the card ensures it’s a word or phrase I really want to learn.

Readers, your thoughts are particularly welcome on this topic!

Now I Am Liking Physical Flash Cards More is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

I feel even more strongly about this now than when I wrote my ebook Five Keys to Learning Spanish Rapidly — the link takes you to my page that describes it — and next time I revise it, I will improve the flashcards section.

But… recently I bogged down. You don’t need my  long list of excuses, but in a nutshell I got busy with other things and my long-term goal of speaking better Spanish almost disappeared off my radar.

This is not a “True Confessions” blog but when I wanted an article for today, it seemed to me that writing about bogging down might be useful, because we all do it.

Drifting away from studying Spanish (or practicing vocabulary with the flashcards) is not the problem.  Because,  as I said, it’s something we are all going to do now and then, sooner or later. The important question is how to get back into learning Spanish. This is different for everyone, and different for any one person at various times.

For me, a few days ago, the moment came when a Mexican friend used a word that I didn’t know,  even in context — and I knew that I had put that word into my flashcard program after she had used it once before.  That annoyed me so much that I ran the program  that evening. I gulped when I discovered I had almost a hundred words and phrases ready to review, but I caught up. And now I’m back on track, maybe not quite as diligently as at other times, but I’m doing it.

As I’ve been writing this, the old song “Pick Yourself Up” kept going through my mind.  I found a version at YouTube sung by one of my favorite singers, Diana Krall. Want a bit of motivation? Take about three minutes and go listen to Pick Yourself Up, Song by Diana Krall on YouTube.

And see if that helps your Spanish! Or whatever is really important to you right now. You can get the essence in the first 30 seconds, if you’re really rushed.

Oops, Been Bogging Down on Flashcards is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

So I decided to tackle past tense verbs with the help of flash cards. It’s been working great. I’m just working with the two main past tenses, the ones you would use to say, for example, “We ate at the new new restaurant last night” or “We were eating when….”

In Spanish, these tenses are the  preterit and the imperfect. The preterit is irregular for many verbs, so I have years of experience in messing it up. The imperfect is easier but I needed some review.

I had these verb conjugations on my refrigerator door, and that helped some, but mainly I think it showed me that more serious study was called for. Things on the refrigerator begin to seem like part of the background very fast!

So then, it was time to bring out the big guns: flash cards on the computer. (See the category for Flash Cards for reviews and tips on flash cards.)

At first, I just put the verbs by themselves into my program, One side might say “they talked,” and the other side would be hablaron. Or one side might be “they were talking” and the other would be hablaban.

But lately I’ve made it more interesting and a way to learn more vocabulary at the same time. I use phrases or sentences with some context, like this:

” He spoke Spanish fluently.” Habló español con soltura.

“They used to talk behind everyone’s backs.” Hablaban a espaldas de todo el mundo.

So where do I get these handy sentences since I’m adding other words or expressions I don’t know? From two places:

1. One is an excellent verb book I got from Amazon, The Big Red Book of Spanish Verbs with CD-ROM. The link takes you to Amazon.
2. The other is a very handy free website, WordReference, which is an online dictionary.

Of course, there are any number of other sources: books you have, other websites, etc.

Maybe this approach will be useful to you, in some way, at whatever level of Spanish you are currently at. Learning sentences is easier than single words, it seems to me, because of the context, and also because of the sound of the words as we repeat them out loud. And I’ve learned one extra lesson: I won’t go talking a espaldas de todo el mundo.

Tackling Past Tense Verbs with Flash Card Programs is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

The flash card software you can get online takes that simple idea of

evaluating how well you know a particular card and takes it way further than just three piles. One popular free program, Mnemosyne, gives you six levels to chose from:

• one if you really don’t know it
• one if you don’t know it but  are beginning to get it
• and four levels of knowing it increasingly well

Anki, the other free program I reviewed is similar, though it may have a different number of levels or describe them a bit differently.

So once you’ve got some words or phrases to learn and they are divided up according to these different levels, the behind-the-scenes power of computer programs works its magic. Using different algorithms, or ways of analyzing the frequency with which to show you the cards, the programs order how often you will see a particular card. If you have marked it that you really know it, you likely won’t see it for weeks or months. If you can barely get it right, chances are it will be in tomorrow’s pile. And if you still don’t know it at all, the program may toss it back to you within a few minutes.

Both of these programs draw on algorithms from a commercial program called SuperMemo. It’s reported to be quite buggy so I didn’t explore it. For a long and intriguing article about SuperMemo and its eccentric creator, see Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm at Wired Magazine’s website.

The flash card program I am using, VTrain, doesn’t have the algorithms built in but you can set them yourself. I’m fiddling with this, and think I like the feature – even though it’s not obvious what the ideal rhythm would be.

Flash Card Programs and Your Memory is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

To  practice at first, you can use some sample card decks that come with the program, but generally you will want to make your own decks, to have exactly the words or phrases you want to learn.

Here’s what the program looked like after I got it going:

Right away I noticed two significant advantages of VTrain over the two free programs I had been testing, Mnemosyne and Anki.

[1] YOU CAN TYPE IN WORDS OR NOT WHEN REVIEWING
Neither Mnemosyne nor Anki allowed for typing in your answer. Sometimes I really want to do this but not always, and I figured my ideal program would give me the option. VTrain actually gives you bunch of options, oshown on the little toolbar below.

Here are your choices when learning the words or phrases you are studying:

You use the blue square if you have typed in your answer and want the program to compare it with the right answer. The green is if you know the answer but don’t feel like typing it, and the red is if you don’t know the answer. The grayed-out square is to show a remark if you have put one on the card, but it is grayed out here because there isn’t one on the card in question. The keyhole is if you want the program to show you the answer, and the recycling symbol is if you want to skip the card for now. There are keyboard shortcuts for these.

So when I am reviewing  vocabulary and I am reasonably sure I know the answer, I hit the keyhole or Control-A  and look at what comes up. If I did know it, I click the green, and the program registers that I know that word.

It doesn’t have the choice that I liked in Mnemosyne and Anki of estimating how well I knew the item. Here, it’s an all-or-nothing matter, and if I got it wrong, it goes back to box #1. However, I find I am using that recycling sign which means “skip the card for now,” if I really almost have it right. Then it stays in the same box.

[2] INSERTING CHARACTERS IS EASY
When you are putting vocabulary into the program, there is a little window you can have open, which has any Spanish characters you might want to insert into the words. For example, here is just the top part of the screen:

On the right, you can see the window with the characters. It didn’t have the ¿ in it when I started using it, but I wanted it because I like to memorize complete sentences and questions.  it’s easy to add characters you want. (This is only part of the list.)

So… I was pleased. This would be better for my particular wishes than Mnemosyne or Anki. The modest price for VTrain didn’t bother me, but if I were on a tighter budget, I’m sure I could have made one of the free programs work fine for me. The algorithms for remembering that those programs use is built in to the software, while VTrain gives you more freedom to set it up as you wish.

How VTrain is Organized

VTrain uses cards, decks, and Cardfiles.  A card is a flash card, with English on one side and Spanish on the other, and it can have images or sound files too.

Cards are organized into decks. As you memorize the words, VTrain will put them into what it calls Cardfiles and I think of as boxes. They use the box analogy too… you can see the row of boxes down the left side here

In this example, I was working with a deck I had created with 11 cards. I made the cardfile have 8 boxes, so I would be reviewing the cards more times than the default 5 times… the help file tells you how to add boxes.

There are no cards in the top box, the one they call the pool, because I have studied all the cards that I’ve entered. The pool is for words you haven’t begun yet. I transferred my 11 cards into the first box and now they are all in the second box because I got them all right today. Confused? It gets easier with practice.

VTrain has a way to put sound files into your card deck, which I didn’t try. Luckily, once you learn the basics of reading and pronouncing Spanish, it’s pretty logical how to pronounce any given word – MUCH more so than English!

If you want to give it a try, you can download  the VTrain trial or you can order it through the same link.

VTrain Flashcard Software: A Review is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

After spending an hour or two with Mnemosyne, Anki was more complicated but I was able to ignore some of the advanced features to get started. I found its grading system easier to use than that of Mnemosyne, and I really liked that the program told you how long it would be till you saw the card again.

The series of short online videos — made by the creator of the program — got me up to speed right away. I like how the videos give you an explanation of what it’s all about before delving into details. Here’s a link to the first of the videos: http://ichi2.net/anki/screencast1.html

Below are three screenshots I made from those videos. This introductory one explains the forgetting curve, which I also discuss in my free ebook, Five Keys to Learning Spanish Rapidly, which you can get by signing up in the upper right corner of any page of this site.

The reality of this forgetting curve is why software like Anki can be so very valuable in helping you learn to speak Spanish. Or Japanese, the language it was originally created for!

The next screenshot shows the situation when you are reviewing the expression “a corrupt judge” and have just had the answer come up in Japanese. As you can see on the bottom of the video, it asks how well you remembered, and your choice determines how soon you will see the card again. If it was difficult, you will see it in 17 days, which makes me think this is probably not the first review of “a corrupt judge” – the program is so sophisticated that it will tell you the times based not only on how hard you think the the question was, but also on how many times you have already reviewed it.

I liked the way Anki handles displays all this much better than I liked the equivalent thing on Mnemosyne.

Here’s the last screenshot I took while watching the videos. It’s just showing how you can edit cards. The sample deck has over 4000 cards in it.

These programs are designed to be used daily. If you get behind, Anki will show you the most important cards first, and you might have a good bit of work to catch up!

Well, I was pretty impressed after I played around with Anki and I might well have used it happily for a long time. But I decided to give VTrain a try as well, and ended up liking it better. I will review it next week.

If you want a free program, Anki seems to be the best there is, and if its features suit your needs, do give it a try. If you like it, there is an option to make a donation to the creator of the program, who has put thousands of hours into it and still updates it. But you are also welcome to use it for free.

I actually think a lot of people will like Anki even better than the one I chose, VTrain. partly because of Anki’s scheduling of when you will next see any given card.

The reasons I chose VTrain have to do with my particular situation…. if you are typing Spanish characters into a keyboard in Windows, you will be typing things like alt-162 where  the numbers have to be on the keypad rather than across the top of your keyobard. Well, it happens that with the ergonomic keyboard I use (Kinesis), there is no numeric keyboard unless I hit Fn-F12 before hitting alt- 162 or whatever, and then I have to remember to turn it off before I continuing.  Too much trouble for me! I know that making things simple is the key to doing them.

Anki can be found at http://ichi2.net/anki/ and there is a wiki about it at http://ichi2.net/anki/wiki/AnkiWiki. Links to the forum are on the site too.

Here is a long and detailed review of Anki.

If you use Anki, please come back here and let us know how it works out for you. My best guess is that it would greatly enhance your ability to remember Spanish vocabulary.

Anki: A Popular Free Spanish Flash Card Program is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

In the title, I called this a Spanish flash card program but you can use it for learning any language. It’s rather a minimalist program, so that sounded nice and easy and I started out with it.

Mnemosyne – there’s something ironic about a hard-to-remember name like that for a memory-aiding program — has a simple, straightforward interface. Here is an example of a screen where I am trying to remember the Spanish for hookworms.  (Why was I learning this particular word? One of our dogs had them not long ago and I made a paper flash card at the time. I was putting some of my paper flash cards into the program.)

At this point I ran into one of the limitations of this program. As I reviewed my cards, I wanted  to type in the word for hookworms and tried to do it in the answer box, but the program wouldn’t let me. (It’s  alfilerillos and I hope you don’t need to know.) I figured that I’d get the spelling better if I wrote it, but that is not an option with Mnemosyne. However, you could have another program open on your computer and type into it, Word or Notepad or anything of the sort.

Once you decide on your answer, and I was saying them out loud, you click on the bar where it says “Show answer.”

Below is another screenshot, just after I’d clicked in the bar for a different card. (As you see, you can input phrases and expressions just as easily as words.) Now that the answer is visible, the little bars at the bottom of the screen from 0 through 5 are no longer grayed out. You are to choose 0 if you had no idea of the answer, 1 if you didn’t know it or guessed wrong, and 2, 3, 4, and 5 for knowing it increasingly well. The tooltips for each number indicate your opinion of whether the interval of time since you last saw it was too long, about right, or too short.

The program uses these numbers to decide how soon to show you the flash card again. If I hit 0 or 1, I got the card immediately or very soon, before the program would go on to something else. Since I had input 51 items the night before, I finally cheated and gave some of the items a 2 just so I could get on with reviewing the software. (The way I know that I put in 51 items is that in the bottom right of the screenshot you can see where it says All: 102. Mnemosyne automatically makes two cards for each English – Spanish pair that you put in, handy for learning both ways.

The program uses a Spaced Repetition System (SRS) algorithm to determine how often to show you the cards again. You can review sooner than it thinks you need to, for example, if you are studying for an exam. I didn’t see a way to put everything on hold, like if you go on vacation.

I didn’t care about being able to add sound or graphics, but evidently you can. It can be used for learning Oriental languages; just the thought of memorizing those characters made Spanish seem like a piece of cake!

IN A NUTSHELL: A basic but good program which runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.  Widely used and popular.

I might have stopped my search for my idea Spanish flash card program with Mnemosyne, but I wanted to be able to type in my answers right in the program… as a writer, sometimes I think my brain resides in my fingertips! I thought I’d rather have a little more control over the frequency of when the cards came up.

Also, I didn’t spot an easy way to type in Spanish characters like ¿ á é í ó and I found cutting and pasting them a bit laborious. Later, I thought I might have used a program on my computer that had those characters (Word probably does) and then just cut and pasted the whole words. Mnemosyne may have an import function too, where you could bring in lists with the characters.

ACCESS: http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/

http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/help/index.php is the documentation.

The option for “Getting Help” from either of these pages includes a link to the forum.

Here is a very long and detailed review of Mnemosyne.

PRICE: Free.

Mnemosyne: A Free Spanish Flash Card Program is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

• the free Mnemosyne (for Windows, Mac, and Linux), basic but effective.
• Anki , also free (for Windows, Mac, Debian/Ubuntu Linux, iphone/iPod, Zaurus, and Windows Mobile) with more features than Mnemosyne.
• VTrain, around $24 US with a free trial period (for Windows, which can also run on Mac or Linux by using programs which emulate Windows, like Wine). I ended up with this one for myself.

I’m a bit of a software fanatic, and enjoy picking the best tool for the job. In the case of a program to increase Spanish vocabulary via flash cards, choosing the best program for you may make the difference between using it heavily, casually, or not at all… with results to match in your language skills.

Programs I didn’t check out fully

If you are on a Mac, here is a full-featured commercial program I didn’t check out since I am on Windows:  http://www.loopware.com/iflash/

I also quickly checked a couple of Windows programs in the $40 US range, WinFlash Educator, and Stackz, but I am not going to review them as I felt VTrain was better for the purpose of learning Spanish vocabulary. They both had appealing features, though, and the WinFlash family had a couple of lower priced versions. You can easily find these by searching in Google or your favorite search engine.

There are also websites where you can do flash cards, but I didn’t explore them much. I prefer a program that resides on my computer. Also, the one flash card website I looked at had too simple a way of reviewing your flash cards.

So What Do You Need In a Spanish Flash Card Program?

As I worked with the programs and saw what they could do, I came up with a list of what mattered to me. Your list might be a little different.

• Ease of use, both in entering vocabulary and in studying it
• Ability to type Spanish characters into the program when adding vocabulary: ¿ á é í ó and others
• Option when reviewing vocabulary to type in the item if I wanted to
• Ability of the software to sort the cards, according to some indication I would give about how well I knew them… and then to present them to me again on an appropriate schedule. Thus the ones I knew well wouldn’t turn up for a long time while the ones I was shaky on would come up soon.

This scheduling feature is a real benefit of using such a program rather than the physical-cards-in-a-shoebox method. I still have my box sitting right next to my desk, but I think it may become history very soon.

Recommended Resources

After I do reviews of those three programs, I will come back and link to them from this page. If you want to get my weekly email newsletter that updates you on new articles on the blog, just sign up for my free ebook in the upper right corner of this page.

Mnemosyne is at http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/

Anki is at http://ichi2.net/anki/ and do notice that there are several nice short videos that explain it.

VTrain is at http://www.vtrain.net/home.htm Since I am starting to use it myself, I’m going to write both a review and an article explaining the basics of its use.

Since reviewing what we have learned is essential for it to move from short-term to long-term memory, I think that a Spanish flash card program is a really important tool in anyone’s practice and learning Spanish.

Spanish Flash Card Programs: An Overview is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.