Flashcards are really a central tool in our toolbox as cardlangers, but whether or not you like flashcards, I have some new ideas to share with you in the video series to make using flashcards more effective.
The first is the Leitner Box. If you’re not using a Leitner Box or some other kind of spaced-repetition-system, you need to get on that. One reason I think a lot of people don’t like to study flashcards or vocabulary every day is because they get bored of repeating the same words, but the beauty of the Leitner Box is you really only study two things every day: new words that you add into the system AND words that for whatever reason you keep having trouble remembering. Words that you can remember easily move farther and farther into the future and you won’t need to review them again until exponentially later dates. It’s really ingenious. If you’re not sure what the Leitner Box is all about, I will put links out to that right here.
Secondly, I’m tremendously excited to share with you a truly innovative game that I recently released, it’s called Fighting Flashcards. For people who aren’t too interested in using flashcards, this is another special way, like the Leitner Box, that I think will change your mind. And if you already like using flashcards, this is gonna blow you away.
So the way Fighting Flashcards works is: you draw a card from the Fighting Flashcards deck and read off a challenge. If you can complete that challenge with the next flashcard in your personal flashcard stack, then you can discard that flashcard. If you can’t complete the challenge then you must move your flashcard to the bottom of your stack. The first person to discard all of their flashcards wins!
Now, what kind of challenges are there? Well, there are speed challenges, so, for example, the first player to identify their next flashcard discards it and everybody else recycles theirs. There is a card I made called Chains, where players take turns testing their flashcards until someone makes a mistake and then that person takes all the cards identified correctly so far as a punishment. It’s just such a cool game. There’s nothing else like it out there. If you want to learn more about Fighting Flashcards, or pick up a copy for yourself, definitely pay a visit to the Language Card Games Shop.
Now, if you would like to play a simplified version of the Fighting Flashcards idea, there is a way you can do that with only your flashcards and a die. And this idea comes to us from a great friend of Language Card Games: Kevin Bullaughey, founder of WordSwing. When he heard about Fighting Flashcards, he mentioned to me he had developed a similar idea where you assign a different type of challenge to complete with your flashcards to each number of a die. Then, you roll the die and do that challenge with your next flashcard. That means, you would have to come up with 6 different types of challenges and maybe write them down on a scratch piece of paper to remember them. I think that would be something really fun you could do with your friends and family members or in a classroom setting, and I will link out to more on this game here at Kevin’s site when he is ready.
Alright that’s it for this post! Don’t forget to like and subscribe so that you and other likeminded people can find your way back to my latest and greatest content. You can also head over to the Language Card Games Shop to buy a game, support what I do, and start playing your way to language-learning success today.
In the next post, I will talk about designing your own language card game!
