This past Monday, I resumed using the flashcard app Anki to memorize French words and phrases, after years of not using it. The reason why I decided to use it again is that I’ve watched several videos of successful language learners on YouTube, who almost universally recommended the use of Anki because of its automated spaced repetition system.
For a long time, I was of the opinion that creating flashcards was too time-consuming and therefore counterproductive for vocabulary acquisition, but those language-learning influencers still seem convinced that using Anki to memorize words is essential for developing their fluency in a foreign language, chipping away at my previously held conviction regarding flashcarding as I kept watching their videos religiously—until I finally caved and decided to give Anki a go one more time.
As a matter of fact, I used to be a diehard believer of flashcarding. I started using flashcards to memorize English words and phrases back in high school in preparation for the college entrance exam. The method was instantly effective and I was able to pass the exam with flying colors. During the first two years of college, I wanted to deepen my understanding of English and doubled down on flashcarding, learning close to 20,000 entries. This enabled me to understand English novels and movies without feeling the need to look up words in the dictionary.
However, around 10 years ago, I began to doubt the efficacy of the flashcarding method as it’s extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming, whether it’s done manually with physical cards or digitally with Anki. I was working full-time and no longer had the luxury of devoting eight hours a day to creating and memorizing flashcards, so something needed to change in my methodology—hence I decided to relinquish flashcarding and switched to simply reading through several pages of dictionary entries multiple times for memorization.
Although the latter strategy has allowed me to progress through the pages in my dictionary much faster, my memory of the words I’ve learned has been precarious at best, making me forget most of the items after a few months. Now that I’ve resumed using Anki, I hope it can help me retain French words more securely in my head, leading to faster development of my vocabulary in the final analysis.
Aside from this revelation about vocabulary learning, another takeaway from those YouTube videos by high-achieving language learners is that they largely focus on spoken language—by watching numerous movies and shows and engaging in tremendous amounts of conversation practice—as compared to written language, i.e., reading and writing.
One aspect of my French that I’m not happy about is my nearly nonexistent ability to speak the language. Throughout my on-again, off-again French-learning journey spanning over two decades, I’ve always told myself that I should never rush myself into speaking until I have acquired sufficient vocabulary to understand native content, including books, movies, and shows.
Looking back, I can’t help but think that I probably might have been too cautious in my approach, because—let’s face it—there will never come a day when I feel truly comfortable with the size of my vocabulary, especially if I only focus on reading books in French. On the other hand, if I develop my speaking ability robustly enough, it can certainly help me grow my vocabulary in a practical way, enabling me to breeze through most contemporary French books.
In this regard, I will probably shift my focus to conversational French rather than written language. I will watch more French shows on Netflix and engage a private tutor online to do conversation practice in earnest. It remains to be seen whether my new strategy works, but I’m fired up anyway about my French study and will keep working in pursuit of my dream of becoming fluent in the Language of Love one day.
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