Flash Cards Are Your Friends

During my undergraduate and early graduate years, my shirt pocket nearly always contained a stack of flash cards. Flash cards can turn any “down time” into study time. If you’re standing in line, waiting for a movie to start, or sitting in a waiting room, whip out your cards and expand your vocabulary. Go through the cards in bunches of ten to twenty. Start by looking at the foreign word first and trying to recall the English meaning. When you can do that perfectly, reverse the process and translate from English to the target language until I know all the words in the stack cold. Keep a stack of cards you’ve mastered out where you can see it and watch it grow. Watching your “done” stack mount higher and higher is a great little motivator.

Although you can buy ready-made flash cards in many languages, it's probably best if you make your own. The process of creating the cards, of writing down the words and their meaning can help you internalize them and learn them more quickly. You can also buy blank flash cards, but here's another trick. Go to drug store or office supply store and buy two or three packs of one hundred 4" x 6" index cards, unruled. Then take these to a local copy shop and ask them to cut these cards in half vertically and laterally. This turns one hundred index cards into four hundred cards that are the perfect size for flash cards. Most copy centers or print shops will do the cutting job very inexpensively.