I’ve always had mixed feelings about flashcards.
For those (few) who have never heard of them, a flashcard is a card (mainly digital, but you can also create your physical deck) containing the input of what you want to learn (e.g. a specific question, like the french revolution year, or the sentence that you want to translate in the language you are learning, like “the cat is on the table”) on the front side, and the corresponding output (e.g. 1789, or “Die Katze ist auf dem Tisch”) on the back side. Especially when using the digital version, every day you should review a subset of your deck: for each card, you self-evaluate your answer by deciding when you think it would be the best moment to see that card again; for instance, if your answer wasn’t properly right or you took some time trying to recover it from your mind, you could decide to review the card in a few days, on the other hand, if you felt confident, you can delay up to the next months. Flashcards support the spacing effect theory, which states that “learning is more effective when study sessions are spaced out”, supporting therefore the long-term acquisition of specific blocks of information.
What went wrong: my experience with the flashcards
Many times I’ve started and dropped them out after a few weeks, despite I was truly recognizing their positive effects on my memory. I’ve mainly used them for learning languages, German, in particular. There are different ways how flashcards can be used; I like to learn one word per card, but instead of using