Today I want to talk about flash cards versus massive input and what have I learned about why one works or the other works. Flash cards have quite a history. Even in the 17th century there was a famous educator called John Amos Kmenius who developed a form of flash card for you know connecting words to pictures uh to be used in education.
John Stewart Mill apparently used flashcards to learn Greek with the word, you know, the Greek word on one side and the English word on the other. And then the flash cards moved to a form of spaced repetition system. And in the 19th century, Ebing House did some research on the memory curve and how soon after first encountering an item, a word or whatever it might be, one should ideally meet that again and again.
And then he developed this ideal frequency to relearn something before we forget it. And in 1972, a German called Lightner wrote a book called So Lentman Lannon describing how, you know, learning was like a filing cabinet. And and I remember reading the book and I thought it was very interesting and it introduced again this idea of space repetition according to a certain formula.
And this was then taken further uh in the late uh you know the 1990s with uh algorithms and Wnjak of uh super memo and Anki and so forth. So it's very much a mainstream part of language learning. But another mainstream part of language learning is compelling input, massive input.
And I want to look at these two based on my recent discovery of the thoughts of Jeffrey Hinton, godfather of AI. And how when he explains how we learn and the fact is that we learn through developing everexpanding ever richer networks of experience that contribute to what we understand, what we learn and in the case of language what we were able to produce in the language. So one problem with flashcards and space repetition which is a refinement of flash cards is that their focus is on sort of tying one item to one item rather than on developing everexpanding networks of knowledge and of experience.
So a flash card is kind of an artificial retrieval experience an isolated retrieval experience where you try to remember this one thing. It's like again Lightner's filing cabinet. What it is you're trying to remember is located in a particular place in your filing cabinet.
And as Hintik explains, we don't learn that way. We don't learn. We don't go to a specific location.
Every exposure to a range of information is an opportunity to enrich our connection. We wait certain things. We wi ghtd.
We put more weight on different aspects of what we're learning. And out of that becomes a richer and richer sense of network of web of connections that enables us to learn. So the question becomes do we want to have this specific association with a specific word and its meaning or do we want to expand this network?
Do we want to develop our natural ability to recognize patterns? And it's the latter that's actually more effective based on Hinton's analysis and based on my experience. So according to Hinton's understanding of how we learn, the retrieval of a flashc card item is a different cognitive activity than exposing oneself to a variety of content with different people, different emotional connection, different lexical or or grammatical connection.
All of which is enriching your ability to understand the material. So rather than memorizing pairs or rules, you're expanding your sense of the rhythm, the intonation, the range of meaning of words. It's a much more complex expanding connection with the language, which this sort of isolated retrieval of a flashc card item just doesn't do that.
It's much much more limited. Another thing is massive input means just that massive input. If you spend an hour with flash cards, how many flash cards are you going to do?
100? Maybe a few more than that, 150. Whereas in the same hour spent with mass input of content, you are exposing yourself to significantly more, massively more words, connections, inferences, grammatical patterns.
And all the while you are simultaneously updating the waiting of different items in your web of connections that relate to that language constantly being renewed every time you're listening and reading. But you need a lot of it. And it's only the massive listening and reading that gives you the quantity of connections to the language that are going to help you learn.
The number of words that you can connect to in flashcard review is limited. even if you use a space repetition system. So to summarize, the flash card is based on the storage model of memory.
You have stuff stored in your brain somewhere in a filing cabinet and you're going to go and retrieve it. It doesn't treat or it ignores the fact that what we're learning in the language is not specific retrieval of items that are stored somewhere, but rather that it's this constant renewal of a network constantly enriching, constantly being re-evaluated, reweed based on whatever the reaction of your brain is to the content that is being massively read and listened to. So again the flash card assumes that there is a pair what's on one side of the card what's on the other side of the card.
So a onetoone sort of dual relationship whereas it's not that. What you need to do every time is to trigger additional regeneration of the language patterns that are in your brain. Now if you have been following me in my videos you'll know that I'm not tremendously I've never been a great fan of flash cards.
I've said so. I've always thought flashcards should be few, easy, and immediately before or after studying a lesson. The flash cards are there to get me through the lesson.
And I've always said I prefer a list to flashards. So, I might look at a list of vocabulary items before doing a lesson sort of to prime me or immediately after doing a lesson. A list always preferable to flashards.
And uh where I do have flashcards, I want them to be easy. So I want both the target language and my own language on the front of the flash card. So I have been never been very enthusiastic about flashards but some people do like flashcards and if I look at it you know there are situations where the flash cards are the solution of choice.
One example would be my granddaughter uh one summer worked in a local supermarket and she had to memorize the codes of the different items in the produce section of the supermarket so that she wouldn't have to look them up each time as a customer came through and had to pay for the items that they had bought. So she created her own flashcard system out of paper for banana, parsley, you know, asparagus or whatever it might be. But there is no connection between banana and asparagus.
So that's not a network. That is a perfect example of a onetoone situation where the flash card is helpful. Another situation where the flash card was helpful is helpful is when you're at the very beginning in a language where nothing connects.
You don't see the connection between different items. For example, if I go in a brand new language, I will typically study that in sentence mode and everything is strange to me. And I will do the matching pairs because it's easy.
Matching pairs for that sentence. So small number of items uh because it's something I can do that's kind of fun that's easy and starts to you know undo the strangeness of the language and and I think Dualingo provides the same benefit that a totally new language which seems so very strange can become a little bit less strange and you start to build a little bit of a of a network of things that connect and a perfect example of that would be when I started into Chinese characters where initially the characters were simply individual characters with individual meaning onetoone relationship at an early stage in the language when I hadn't yet developed enough familiarity with Chinese characters to see how they related to each other and you know in terms of some of the components and then of course later on as I got better in Chinese I had enough of a sense of the language overall that I no longer needed to do the flashcards because I now was able to take advantage of the sense of the environment of the language the connectivity between different elements in what I was reading or listening So in those situations, the flash card is a viable system. However, when flashc carding becomes a chore because you have so many flash cards to do and the flash cards that you were going through are now far removed from when you first encountered them in a bit of content.
Then I think the disadvantages of flash cards that I outlined here become a bigger and bigger, you know, burden, become more and more evident. And at that point, you should move away from flashcards and focus more on massive exposure to the language, which is going to ultimately enable you to develop the the web of connections that you need in order to understand better and eventually produce the language better. So, people are going to say that I'm unfair, that I'm prejudiced against flashcards.
I'm not prejudiced against anything that people like to do because the fundamental, you know, rule number one in language learning is do the things you like to do because if you like to do certain things and if you stay with it, you will improve. However, based on my understanding of how the brain learns, my belief right now is that if you want to be more efficient in your language learning, focus on input and minimize flashcards. Thanks for listening.
