Today I made some flashcards for Greek verbs.

The cards contain only Greek — no English translations.

A Day with Time to Study

I spent about six hours working on Greek today. I don’t usually have that much time available for language learning, but work was slow and I didn’t have to go anywhere.

I worked on several different activities:

  • Duolingo
  • writing sentences
  • verb flashcards
  • substitution drills
  • writing a short paragraph about my family for AI to correct

I’ll write about the AI activity tomorrow. Today I want to talk about the flashcards.

Why I Made the Flashcards

When I started my Duolingo lessons today, they began introducing the past tense. I understand how the present tense works, but I am not yet producing many sentences on my own.

Moving on to the past tense didn’t feel like the most helpful next step.

Instead, I went back through earlier lessons that focused on verbs and wrote down a number of example sentences. From those sentences, I made some flashcards.

Flashcards Without Translation

About fifteen years ago, at a language conference, someone suggested that if we use flashcards for language learning, the cards should contain only the target language.

That idea had never occurred to me before.

Traditionally, flashcards have the word you want to learn on one side and the English translation on the other. I had never been a big fan of flashcards because languages are learned best when we can skip the translation step.

But the idea of using flashcards that stay entirely in the target language intrigued me, and I’ve been experimenting with different ways to do it.

How I Made the Cards

For this activity I wrote the Greek verb on one side of each card.

On the other side I wrote several sentences that used that verb. These sentences came from earlier Duolingo lessons.

It took about an hour to make nine flashcards because I had to go back through the lessons and find good examples.

How I Used the Flashcards

To practice, I first looked at the verb and tried to create several sentences using it.

Then I turned the card over and read the example sentences. After that, I created additional sentences using those examples as a framework.

Example

One of the verbs was “to want.”

Before turning the card over, I produced a few simple sentences:

  • I want water.
  • He wants a dog.
  • My mother wants a new house.

Then I flipped the card over and looked at the sentences I had written earlier. One of them was:

I want eight cats.

Using that pattern, I created additional sentences with numbers and plural nouns:

  • I want seven cats.
  • He wants three cars.

Another sentence on the card was:

The baby doesn’t want the apple.

That helped me practice forming negative sentences as well.

180 Sentences

I went through my nine flashcards twice.

I created about ten sentences for each card, so by the end I had produced roughly 180 sentences.

They were not complex sentences, but they were sentences I generated myself — and that is a big win.

Looking Ahead

I plan to make more verb flashcards and keep this as a regular activity a couple of times each week.

If you want to see other ideas for using flashcards that stay entirely in the target language, see this article:
Using Flashcards Without Translation.