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The most effective spaced repetition flashcard learning methods

A spaced repetition software like Flashcard Learner adapts to your learning style and presents you only what you need to repeat right before you forget it. The algorithms of the learning software are optimized so that you spend as little time as possible on learning and repeating with a guaranteed recall of 90-95%. There are however some strategies how you can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your learning even more (depending on your situation and ambitions).

Those strategies are divided into two major groups:

Methods how to best add new flashcards to your repetition sessions:

  1. The fastest way of learning
  2. The steadiest way of learning
  3. The combined approach


Methods to make sure that your mental state is optimally prepared for the repetition and learning session in order to maximize your retention and recall rate and to minimize the total invested time:

  1. Repeat before learning new flashcards
  2. Do the learning and repetition session in the mornings
  3. Get enough sleep
  4. Do not overload your brain

1. The fastest way of learning

By adding every day a constant number of new flashcards (e.g. 10 new flashcards daily) you will achieve the fastest predictable learning possible. However, you will also need to repeat the flashcards you have learned previously – and since you keep adding new flashcards every day the total number of flashcards to be repeated is increasing significantly. It usually settles on average at around 3-4 times the number flashcards you add daily. So, if you add 10 cards a day you will also have to repeat around 30-40 cards per day additionally. These numbers are averages for adding a constant number of cards for up to about two months. For longer time periods these numbers will increase, since the flashcards you have learned some months back will show up again and have to be repeated as well. Hence the factor increases from 3-4 to about 5-6, that is 50 to 60 cards to repeat when learning 10 new cards per day.
If you keep learning that way you will be able to predict quite accurately how many days or learning sessions it will take you to learn all the cards in your database. However, you cannot predict exactly how much time you will be spending to repeat the flashcards on any given day. Although the average number is about 3-4 times the daily number of newly added flashcards (5-6 times for longer learning periods) there can arise peaks when you actually have to repeat more flashcards than that. You will find, however, that on average your learning and repetition times stay remarkably constant, once the process of learning and repeating has settled in. It is just that for any particular session you will not be able to tell exactly how long it will take. This will make time planning for a given day in the near future difficult. You will have to resort to using upper bound estimates for your learning session.

2. The steadiest way of learning

A different way of adding new flashcards is to adjust your learning to your daily repetition load. You will see that the average time per flashcards or accordingly the average time for a certain number of flashcards (e.g. 30 cards) is relatively constant. Thus if you introduce the habit of repeating every day 30 flashcards or you set your time to repeat for say 5 minutes you will find the exact number of flashcards that can fit into the allocated time. For language word flashcards a rule of thumb is about 10 flashcards per minute. So by investing 5 minutes for repetition you can repeat about 50 cards (of course your mileage may vary depending on your familiarity with the learned cards, the difficulty of the flashcards and other factors). Adding new cards then is performed such that the number of cards to be repeated the next day stays constant (in the example 50 flashcards). Like that the invested time for this example will be on average around 5 minutes a day. With this method it is however not possible to predict accurately the date when you will have added all your flashcards in your data base. It brings you however stability if you want to plan your learning schedule. Add and learn more flashcards only when it does not exceed the scheduled number of flashcards to repeat for the next day. Additionally, do not add more than maximally 20-30 new flashcards per day, since a large number will have repercussions later on when you have to repeat them again. To put it another way: while it seems absolutely fantastic to be able to pile several hundred new flashcards into your short-term memory at once, the prospect of repeating those several hundred flashcards the next day and then in a few days again is not very motivating. In fact, being confronted with a large number of flashcards to repeat is a very bad thing. Flashcard Learner allows you to deal with such situations in several ways:

  1. You can stop at any time and continue to repeat the scheduled flashcards at a later time.
  2. You can push any desired number of flashcards to the next day or several days. For example, if you had to repeat at once 700 flashcards, you could “push” them over to the next few days so that you repeat 70 flashcards for the next 10 days instead, or any number you like.

The only drawback with these methods is that by postponing the scheduled repetition you will push the flashcards past their due date. Since Flashcard Learner schedules the flashcards to be repeated at the last possible moment before your will forget them, postponing the repetition will likely cause some flashcards to be pushed “over the edge”. Thus, your retention rate will naturally decrease as long as you push scheduled cards forward. On the other hand a lowered retention rate is much more tolerable than the demotivational prospect of slogging through 700 accumulated flashcards. Hence, do yourself a favor and do not learn more than about 1/4 of what you are willing to repeat every day. Learn 10 cards per day if you are OK to repeat 40, learn 100 cards per day, if you can mentally stand repeating 400 flashcards per day. Of course, the more flashcards you learn per day, the faster you will advance in your learning quest. Just be careful not to overdo it.

3. The combined approach

In most cases, when you are not pressed for time to have learned all the information e.g. for an exam you will profit most by the combined approach, which uses both approaches 1 and 2 to include the best of both worlds. The idea is simple: start with the fastest way to learn (approach 1) until you reach a critical number of repetitions (e.g. something like 6 times the number of new flashcards learned every day) and then stop learning for some days until the number of repetitions has decreased to a more manageable number (maybe 3 times) and subsequently use the steadiest way of learning (approach 2) to keep the number of repetitions on your desired number, of which you know by experience, how long it will take to perform a repetition session.

Let’s illustrate this approach with an example: Let’s assume that you want to learn Spanish. You decide that you want to learn 10 new words every day. Thus, in the first 3 months, you will learn about 10x3x30=900 words. You will notice however, that by now, you have to repeat about 60 flashcards per day to keep up the 90-95% retention rate. This might be too much for you, so you decide to stop learning and adding new flashcards for a while (maybe 2 weeks). During the time you are not adding new flashcards you will notice, that the number of scheduled flashcards per day drops relatively quickly, so after those 2 weeks, you will be likely to repeat only about 20-30 flashcards in total. Since you are not finished yet with learning Spanish, you decide you want to continue learning, but want to keep the total number of repetitions at around 30 per day. Today you have repeated 25 flashcards, tomorrow there are 22 scheduled. Thus you decide to add and learn another 8 flashcards to make it 30 for the next day. From now on, you will be repeating as close as possible to 30 cards every day, and you make sure that you will add new flashcards when the number of scheduled repetitions is below 30 or not learn new flashcards when the number of scheduled repetitions is above 30.
Just a simple time estimate: In order to repeat 30 language flashcards (words or small sentences) it will take you about 3 minutes (about 10 flashcards per minute). The time for learning 10 new flashcards depends on how many words you already know in that particular language, your familiarity with the language, and how well you can store new information in your short-term memory. On average it will take you about 30 seconds to learn one word. Thus, learning 10 new words will be about 6 minutes of your time.

Hence, first you learn and move forward as fast as possible until you reach a certain saturation, then you back it down a little and learn as steadily as possible to reach the finish line in an acceptable daily time investment.

4. Repeat before learning new flashcards

When you start up Flashcard Learner we recommend that you first repeat all the flashcards in your different data bases. After that, depending on your brain state and your schedule and time commitment you can decide whether you want to add / learn some new flashcards. Of course you are free to choose to do it the other way round, however our experience has shown that the mental performance seems to suffer for the repetitions when you previously filled new stuff into your short-term memory by learning new flashcards. Even worse, the recall and retention rate seems to be negatively affected for the repetition scheduled the next day for the newly learned flashcards. Every brain works differently, though, and it might be worth to experiment with your individual learning and repetition routine to find the optimal learning parameters for your own learning sessions.

5. Do the learning and repetition session in the mornings

If you become serious about optimizing your mental performance you will find that doing your repetition sessions and learning new flashcards is best done in the morning after getting up or at least in the first half of your day. You can make the experiment yourself doing some sessions on consecutive days in the morning or in the evening. Our experience suggests that the average retention and recall rate is consistently higher when your brain is still fresh in the morning, when not so many impressions from the day are packed already in the short-term memory. We have found differences up to 7% in the average performance. By scheduling the repetition sessions in the morning you will further reduce the time spent learning and repeating due to better retention and recall rates.

Some people argue that if the method really worked then the recall rate should and must be independent of the time of day you do your repetition session. And they are right … almost. The problem with this argument is that it does not take all the important factors into account. While your memory recollection is indeed within statistical errors independent of the time of day you do the repetition your attention span, concentration and patience is not. And here lies the problem.
The drop of the recall rate, which we have noticed stems from at least these three factors. After a day of work you will not be able to focus in the same attentive way to the repetition of the cards as you would if you repeated them in the morning. Very often you tend to overlook a question and misinterpret it, answering it in a wrong way. Rereading the question after being puzzled by the seemingly wrong answer adds to a certain annoyance towards yourself. And that decreases the focus and concentration even further. Thus, inattentiveness, impatience and annoyance are the main cause for a noticeable drop in your retention rate.
There is a remedy against the overlooking – to do it more slowly. And indeed, if you force yourself to do the cards at a slower pace you will find that the retention rate remains the same as in the morning. However, since the session will take longer and you already have a diminished focus and attention span it requires much more will power. Additionally, since you might be tired but have to do the cards more slowly your patience might wear thin, especially if you have many cards to repeat (notice though that with Flashcard Learner you can stop at any time and continue the rest of the cards at any later time – this incurs however the risk that you will have a reduced retention rate since some of the items might be pushed past their predicted forgetting date already).
Thus, in order to achieve the same retention rate in the evening as in the morning, usually the average time per flashcard is increasing, that is, the learning and repetition session takes longer. Conversely, by maintaining the same average time per flashcard the retention rate might drop by several percentage points in the evening compared to the morning due to inattentiveness and the resulting annoyance.
But fortunately all of these minor drawbacks can be easily prevented simply by performing the repetition sessions in the morning.

In short, your brain works faster and better in the morning after a good night’s sleep.

6. Get enough sleep

When learning new material it is first temporarily stored into your short-term memory. The short-term memory is created by so called transient patterns of neuronal communications in your brain. These patterns are located in the regions of the frontal lobe (in particular the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and the parietal lobe. Long-term memories on the other hand are formed by much less volatile and more permanent neural connections. Those memory traces are distributed and widely spread over the whole brain. For the transfer of information from the short-term to the long-term memory, that is learning and retaining new information, the region of the brain called hippocampus is needed. This part is essential for the transfer (consolidation) of short-term memories to the long-term memory. While the hippocampus seems to process and coordinate the transfer it does not store the information itself. It has been found that the highest consolidation of new material is achieved with a sufficient amount of sleep. The short-term memory has a limited capacity. The only two ways to make room for new information is

  1. to either evaluate it for its importance, condense it and move it to your long term memory or
  2. discard and flush it.

The first way happens only during sleep (the phase when we are dreaming REM – rapid eye movements). If you learn a lot at once you will be very likely dreaming intensively about the newly learned material in the following night. We do not recommend this approach, however. It is better learning little but consistently, in small bites so to say: e.g. 10-20 flashcards every day for a period of 3 months will result in ~900-1800 flashcards learned.
However, the second way, i.e. discarding, is much more common. The longer you stay awake and the less sleep you get the more of the information you have crammed into your short-term memory will be discarded again.

7. Do not overload your brain

While the algorithms of Flashcard Learner ensure that you can learn a huge amount of material and completely fill up your short-term memory (it is not uncommon that you can learn easily several hundred (!) flashcards a day), there is a natural limit of what you can learn and process during any one day. If you go beyond that limit your ability to learn new information will

  1. strongly decrease: you will feel it when you hit that point (the most likely sensation is a feeling of overwhelm and mental shutdown up to nausea and vertigo)
    and
  2. you will erase part of what you have shoved previously into your short-term memory, which ultimately will hurt badly your retention rate for the repetition session the following day.

You maximum capacity is not fixed but strongly depends on your mental training and the familiarity with the subject. In time you will get used to a larger and larger number of flashcards you can learn in any one day (provided you schedule time for the subsequent repetitions, since else all your efforts will have been in vain). Secondly, in particular with foreign language learning your brain will adapt in time to the structure and sounds of the new language. Therefore to learn 100 words in the beginning for your language learning is much more difficult and time consuming than another 100 words after you have learned already several thousand. Your brain then has organized itself and categorized word groups and has found ways of adding the new words into the already existing categories of sounds and meanings.
If you feel overwhelmed or tired or dizzy during learning new flashcards you will have most likely hit your current short-term memory capacity limit. Stop for the day or at least make a break of one hour or more. Get some rest and fresh air. This will clear up your brain again if you intend to keep learning. It is however best not to do such kind of expenditures. It is better to learn regularly every day but relatively little such as 5 words in the beginning and then maybe up to 20 to 30 words per day. That way you will not overload your brain, keep a high retention rate and will always have a manageable number of flashcards, which will ultimately help your long term motivation and accordingly your learning success.

Conclusion:

Set a goal to learn and then follow it through with either the fastest or the steadiest or better yet the combined approach until you have reached your learning goal. Repeat first the scheduled flashcards, only then learn new ones. Try to do your repetition sessions in the morning, get enough sleep and don’t overload your brain by learning too many flashcards at once.

With these tips you will be successful learning any goal you have set and reach it in the most efficient and effective way possible.

You can download a free evaluation version of Flashcard Learner to convince yourself how quickly and efficiently you can learn and retain all you have learned. Never forget anything again.

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