Language Learning: On Using Flashcards

This post is both inspired by and written for my students who often ask me “how should I study?”

It sort of depends on which level class is askng me this, but my general answer to this question is: “read more.”

If you have time for nothing else, just read (or reread) a text. Or even better yet, try to write your own stories.

In Latin especially there are endless graded readers, including readers from the 1900s that are out of copyright that could be found on archive.org. Some of them are rather insensitively-worded on some topics (particularly American history) but even with that potential hazard, one can find plenty of reading material. Some Latin teachers today are producing their own Latin works like novellas which can be tremendously helpful, or you could read through a textbook like Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata.

So my first advice is to prioritize reading and seeing words in context, though some grunt work of learning paradigms is always necessary. One needs to learn how to recognize the endings of words, and understand how verbs will change to indicate their tense and so on and so forth.

But I tend to discourage the use of flashcards.

Now, I will nuance this by saying that there are certain types of words that the Roman grammarian Varro calls “barren” or “fruitless” because they do not change their forms. For example, the Latin words “enim” “autem” “sed” “et” “atque” and words like this that do not inflect at all can well enough be put on flashcards and reviewed. They’re more limited in scope and function.

There are other types of words that are more complex by nature, especially words with a wide semantic range. Many verbs that have very long dictionary entries or nouns that also have a lot of possible meanings depending on the context.

I discourage putting those kinds of words on flashcards because you can only put down a small handful of possible definitions and those are all out of context, and viewing a word on a flashcard doesn’t mean you actually have learned the word. It means you’ve learned to recognize it when you see it, but not necessarily how to understand it.

Verbs like “ago, agere” or “gero, gerere” or similar verbs have wide semantic ranges, and it takes considerable skill in the language sometimes to choose the appropriate translation for the word in its context. These verbs are especially difficult because they are used in so many idioms like “gratias agere” - “to give thanks” or “bellum gerere” - “to wage war,” among many others. These are the types of deep Latin knowledge that one really only gains from reading.

Some nouns have technical legal meanings depending on where you find them like “causa, causae, f.” which can mean “cause” as its derivative suggests, but it can also mean “legal case” if you happen to be reading something like Cicero’s Pro Roscio. But it’s unlikely that a student who wants to really read Latin and also uses flashcards is going to have the ability to jot down all those meanings on a card, let alone internalize them all. The same goes for adjectives too, and perhaps especially adjectives, whose meanings might depend on the noun they are paired with, or any number of other semantic factors when reading a sentence.

A flashcard with a vocabulary item is essentially a word in a vacuum. Looking at a beetle in a glass case might teach you the type of beetle it is, but it doesn’t tell you anything about its behavior if you find a live one somewhere. A word isn’t a dead thing on a page.

The trouble is this: words “hang together” to create structures, and are thus interdependent.

Flashcards, used indiscriminately, can really torpedo your ability to learn the words in their proper structures, alongside other words. This is especially true of inflected languages like Latin or Greek where you often rely so much on the data from the rest of the sentence to construe meaning.

After some googling, I discovered that flash cards are an invention of modernity. At least, we have no evidence of things resembling flashcards prior to the 1700s. Part of this is simply because paper was a scarce resource and not something to be wasted. And it’s hard to avoid the sneaking suspicion that in the world without flashcards, people were generally better-stocked with knowledge than we are now.

As far as I can tell from this article, the real widespread use of flashcards began in the early 1900s and quickly became integrated into mass education when the colleges became factories rather than houses of learning. Flashcards are a product of the modern preoccupation with increased speed and efficiency.

It appears also that for some decades, flashcards were mainly used in arithmetic instruction and less in language instruction, where the primary modus operandi of learning languages like Latin and Greek would have been through reading.

I have reasons I prefer to use Wheelock’s Latin for my classes as the basis of instruction, but I tend to move quickly into readers alongside the textbook and build as much reading time into my classes as possible, while also prioritizing grammar instruction. That said, a book like Lingua Latina can be an excellent supplement for your reading life. Another fantastic resource I use in my classes is Ritchie’s Fabulae Faciles. I have also enjoyed this reader, and find it entertaining but there are many others you can find online.

In reading some of the extant fragments of Varro’s On the Latin Language, I was really struck by the analogies he uses to describe words as “living” things that have a bit of a life of their own, and while we can certain describe them or talk about them, there’s something about language itself that certainly eludes us. Any of the Greek or Roman grammarians will acknowledge the highly “structured” nature of their respective languages, and their view of words will reflect that. I doubt that an ancient grammarian would have been particularly keen on the idea of flashcards because they remove words from their intended structures and usages, and depending on the word, you might get trapped with a small handful of particular meanings that are all very closely related and be unable to imagine other possibilities when you see it “in the wild” of a Latin text.

So the upshot of this is: be judicious. Understand that the nature of language in its organic context is not going to play particularly well with flashcards and vocabulary lists where your information is limite. Some types of words, as I discussed above, may be better suited for flashcards while others are not.

At the end of the day, reading, writing, and interacting with the language is the best way to learn vocabulary.