Hey guys in this video I'm going to be comparing what are probably the two most popular SRS card formats, sentence cards and vocab cards.
And before I actually jump in, let me take a step back and explain the broader framework for how we actually think about SRS card formats at refold.
So broadly speaking we can break all SRS card formats into two categories, production cards and comprehension cards.
Production cards try to get you to produce your target language in some way.
So for example you could have a native language word on the front of a card and your goal is to produce your target language's equivalent of that word.
Another common example is cloze deletion cards,
where on the front of the card you might have a target language example sentence with one word missing and your job is to fill in the blank.
On the other hand we have comprehension cards.
On a comprehension card,
the front of the card simply consists of a piece of your target language, whether that's a sentence or an individual word,
and your job is simply to understand or comprehend that piece of language.
Now at refold we take the perspective that the role of the SRS within the language learning process is to improve your ability to comprehend your target language,
and it's through actually comprehending native input in your target language that you will acquire the language and go on to eventually become able to produce it naturally.
So we don't view the SRS as a tool for helping you cultivate output ability directly.
And for this reason, we are pretty much exclusively focused on comprehension cards, not on production cards.
Now within the category of comprehension cards there are four different card formats we can use depending on what we put on the front of our cards.
We can put either text or audio on the front of cards, and we can also put either an isolated target language word or an entire target language example sentence.
And these two distinctions end up giving us four total card formats.
We can have either text sentence cards or text vocab cards as well as audio vocab cards and audio sentence cards.
Each of these four card formats are completely valid and have their own unique pros and cons.
So at refold we recommend using a mix of all four.
With that said, in this particular video I'm going to be focusing on the text portion of the quadrant, text vocab cards versus text sentence cards.
Okay so first we have text sentence cards.
So the front side of a text sentence card contains a written target language sentence, and generally the sentence contains a single unknown target language word,
and then on the backside we have a definition of that unknown word and that definition can be either bilingual or monolingual.
Now optionally on the back of the card you can also have an image related to either the example sentence, or the unknown word,
and you can also have audio either in the form of isolated target word audio or audio for the entire example sentence, or both.
When reviewing a sentence card, the goal is simply to fully understand the sentence on the front of the card.
Sentence cards were first proposed by Auntie Moon about 20 years ago, and they were popularized by Khatzumoto from AJATT.
I personally exclusively use sentence cards while learning Japanese, and feel that they served me very well.
And next we have text vocab cards, the front side of a text vocab card contains a single target language word,
and the backside of the card contains the definition of that word, either monolingual or bilingual, as well as an example sentence.
Now it's completely crucial that there is an example sentence on the back of the card
because without an example sentence you really just can't get a sense of what the word really means and how it's actually used
Also same as sentence cards on the back of cards you can optionally have an image and or audio.
When reviewing text vocab cards, the goal is to recall the meaning of the word that's on the front of the card.
Now vocab cards have been around pretty much forever, but in recent years a very particular form of vocab card has been growing in popularity thanks to a member of the Japanese learning community, named Quizmaster,
a couple years ago Quizmaster released a blog post detailing an extensive argument for why his particular variety of vocab cards, which he dubbed anime cards are superior to sentence cards.
Anime cards are essentially high quality text vocab cards,
which on the back, always include an example sentence audio for that example sentence, isolated target word audio and an image,
I'll put a link to quiz masters blog posts in the description.
Although we disagree on many points I do think he makes a lot of really interesting arguments, and he also has a lot of great general advice for efficiently making Anki cards.
Now although I think Quizmaster made a great contribution to the immersion learning community with his blog post,
I think it's pretty unfortunate that he decided to name this particular card format anime cards, as they have absolutely nothing to do with anime.
For this reason, I've decided to simply refer to these cards as text vocab cards.
Now one last thing I want to note is that although like I just mentioned Quizmaster feels very strongly that it's important to have double audio and an image on the back of every vocab card,
my personal experience is that although it's definitely nice to have audio and images,
they don't really make or break anything and the card functions the same way either way.
So my view is that if you can get audio and images on your cards then definitely do that
but if it's too much of a hassle, then don't really stress over it
and when talking about various card formats
I definitely don't think it's worth making a distinction between text vocab cards with audio on the back and tex vocab of cards without.
Okay so now that we understand how these card formats work, let's jump into the comparison.
Now I just want to emphasize right off the bat that like I mentioned at the very beginning of this video,
I think that both of these formats are completely valid, and then they each have different pros and cons,
I personally use a mix of both and I would recommend you to do the same.
Now I mentioned that when I learned Japanese, I used exclusively text sentence cards,
but I'm currently in the process of learning Mandarin and for the past six months, as an experiment I tried to exclusively using text vocab cards.
Now I had really great results but now that I'm starting to move into a more intermediate level with my Mandarin,
I've been finding myself starting to gravitate back towards sentence cards.
And upon reflecting on this, I came to the conclusion that vocab cards are better for beginners, but sentence cards are overall better for intermediate learners.
And here's why.
When reviewing a sentence card you need to make sure that you're fully understanding the sentence,
including what all the individual words mean as well as what the sentence means as a whole.
Now when you're still a beginner in the language, this can be really exhausting, and that's why vocab cards are so nice.
You only have to focus on understanding a single word.
the example sentence is still there on the back to help you make sure that you're properly understanding the word,
but because you're not testing yourself on your comprehension of that sentence, there's not nearly as much pressure.
On a similar note, because the example sentence is on the back of the card and you're not testing yourself on your comprehension of it,
it's not crucial that you perfectly understand the whole sentence.
even if there's a couple words you don't know or you don't understand the exact nuance of that example sentence,
as long as you get the gist of it, then it's still going to play the role of bolstering your understanding of the target word.
This is really helpful when you're trying to sentence mine as a beginner.
Because when you're a beginner in a language and you still suck, it can be quite difficult to find sentences
where there's only one word you don't know and once you look up that word, you become able to fully understand the whole sentence.
So, in this way vocab cards are really great for beginners
because there's much less mental stress associated with reviewing them and the criteria for finding appropriate example sentences is much less stringent.
But things start to shift once you reach a more intermediate level.
First of all, once you start to have some real footing in the language both of these two positives of the vocab card start to become a lot less relevant.
Basically you start finding sentences that only contain one unknown word all over the place
and confirming that you fully understand one of these sentences ceases to be such a burden as well.
And on the other hand, it starts to become much more of an issue that vocab cards have no way of handling words with multiple meanings.
For example, take the word bark in English, bark has at least two completely different meanings.
"A dog's bark" and "the bark of a tree".
Let's say, an English learner comes across the word "bark" for the first time in the context of "a dog's bark"
and creates a vocab card to learn the word.
That will work just fine up until the point where the person comes across the other meaning of "bark", "the bark of a tree".
Now it doesn't make sense to just have two vocab cards that both simply say "bark" on the front
because there'll be no way to know which one is which.
One option is to have a single card for both meanings
but in my experience trying to learn multiple different meanings of a word with a single card is just stressful and not very effective.
Instead, it's going to make a lot more sense to simply make two sentence cards.
The front of one card could say "The dog's bark was very loud", and the front of the other could say "The tree's bark was a dark brown".
Now I will mention that in quiz masters blog posts
he recommends adding a hint field to the front of vocabulary cards in order to add disambiguating information in these sorts of situations.
But at that point you've pretty much just turned the vocab card into a sentence card, so we might as well just think of it as a sentence card.
So basically when you're a beginner in a language,
generally you're only going to be learning the most common meaning of each word that you learn.
So it's not really an issue that vocab cards don't have any real way of helping you keep track of words that have multiple meanings.
On the other hand, once you start to become a more intermediate learner, you're going to want to start learning multiple meanings of the words that you know.
And for this, sentence cards are going to be a lot more useful.
But in my experience, there's an additional large benefit that sentence cards have over vocab cards for intermediate learners
and that's that they're much more synergistic with monolingual definitions.
Basically when reviewing the vocab card, you're showing the target language word out of context and you have to recall the meaning.
So for example, a Japanese learner might make a card that has "走る" on the front and "to run" on the back.
When reviewing the card he would see the Japanese word "走る" and simply have to recall the English definition "to run".
In this way, as long as the definition of the target word is relatively short and succinct then reviewing vocab cards is streamlined and straightforward.
The problem is that once you start transitioning to using monolingual definitions, things get a lot more abstract and the streamlined review process starts to break down.
In order to demonstrate this I just made up a new English word. Intration
"Intration" is when you understand that you're in the wrong and have no right to be angry, and yet experience anger anyway.
So let's imagine that we created a vocab card to learn the word "Intration" monolingualy.
At the front of the card would simply say "Intration" and the back of the card would say
"to experience anger despite understanding that you're in the wrong and have no right to be angry".
When reviewing this card in order to confirm to yourself that you still remember what the word means,
you would have to either recall the entire lengthy definition or somehow recall the abstract essence of the word directly.
In my experience trying to recall lengthy definitions is extremely cumbersome and tiring
and trying to directly recall the abstract essence of a word clearly enough that I'm confident I still actually understand what the word means,
is even more headache inducing.
Instead imagine that we made a sentence card with the following sentence on the front.
"Instead of lashing out like he always does, this time John experienced intration."
When presented with this sentence, our minds are naturally prompted to conjure up John's emotional state,
inevitably leading us to recall the meaning of the target word in the process.
This allows us to confirm and reinforce our understanding of the target words meaning in a natural and stress free way.
In this way, sentence cards lend themselves to working with abstract monolingual definitions, much more than vocab cards do.
So summarize, vocab cards are really nice for beginners because they allow you to focus in on a single word at a time while reviewing
and also make it so that you don't have to be so strict on selecting example sentences for cards.
On the other hand, they're not ideal for intermediate learners because they have no good way of dealing with words that have multiple meanings,
and they're quite frustrating to review when you start working with abstract monolingual definitions.
Additionally, the pros of the vocab cards start to become less relevant, once you become an intermediate learner.
And for these reasons, intermediate learners are going to be much better served by only focusing on sentence cards.
That said, it's probably ideal to use some degree of both no matter what stage you are in the process.
For example, even as a beginner, it might make sense to use sentence cards to learn more abstract verbs and adjectives,
whereas no matter what level you're at, it's probably always gonna make the most sense to use vocab cards for concrete nouns.
As you experiment with both card formats, you'll develop an intuition for what the pros and cons of each of them are,
and this will allow you to select which card format is ideal, on a word per word basis.
In fact I personally use an Anki card type with a conditional word field.
If I fill this word field the card becomes a vocab card, and if I leave this word field blank it becomes a sentence card.
And I can switch a card back and forth between both card formats at any point in a cards life.
Okay, so I've already finished talking about what I consider to be all the most relevant points related to sentence cards and vocab cards.
But there's a few other additional points I want to address that get commonly brought up in the community.
The first is related to the strength of memories created by each card format.
It's often said that vocab cards create stronger memories than sentence cards because sentence cards are too easy.
Basically in a sentence card, the sentence itself can function as a hint that makes it easier to remember the target word,
therefore letting your memory off the hook without as much of an intense workout.
The worry here is that if your brain learns to rely on the particular example sentence you use in your Anki card
then when you come across that word in a different sentence in your immersion, you might not be able to recognize it.
Now, I definitely think there is some truth to this, but I don't think it's as significant as a lot of people make it out to be.
This problem of being able to recognize words within Anki but not when you come across them in your immersion
is inevitable regardless of what card format you use.
In my experience, this is an unavoidable part of the learning process.
You simply need to come across some words multiple times in your immersion before the memories fully activate and become context dependent.
So, while I do think vocab cards have some advantage over sentence cards in this particular area,
like I just mentioned, I don't think it's as significant as it's often made out to be.
As I've already mentioned a couple times, I exclusively use sentence cards when learning Japanese.
And I never had any real issues with my SRS work transferring over to my immersion.
The second point I want to address is related to the speed of reviewing.
In his blog post Quizmaster claimed that reviewing vocab cards is much faster than reviewing sentence cards,
but this hasn't been my experience.
When I review vocab cards, I always read and listen to the example sentence on the back of the card.
It helps reinforce the target word, and it's also an opportunity to get fully comprehensible input.
And so, timewise, it doesn't really matter whether I'm reading the example sentence on the front of the card or the back of the card.
The amount of time it takes is the same.
Additionally, assuming that you're already at least an intermediate learner, you can easily read sentence cards quickly if you want it to do so.
At an intermediate level or above, reading a single sentence that you can already comprehend only takes a couple seconds at most.
So yeah, that's pretty much all the thoughts that I had related to text vocab cards versus text sentence cards.
Probably gonna keep experimenting with different card formats and my own Mandarin studies probably get into audio cards in the near future as well.
So I'll probably have more videos related to that in the future.
If you're interested in taking the ideas that I expressed in this video
and putting them into a comprehensive study plan to steadily move your way towards fluency in your target language,
and please definitely check out Refold, which you can find at refold.la.
On the Refold website you can also find a link to join our free discord community where you can meet other people who are also using this method to learn a language
as well as get your questions answered and receive guidance and things like that.
You can also support refold and get access to exclusive content on the refold Patreon.
So please consider checking that out if you feel so inclined.
So yeah, thanks so much to everyone who watched all the way to the end of this video, and best of luck with your studies.