French flashcards: make your own and review them in boxes

French flashcards are cards with French on one side and its meaning on the other, and the tool above lets you make your own and review them in five boxes. The tool has no French of its own: you bring the words. Below: how to use it, what memory research says, what to put on a card, and paper versus apps. For how recall fits into a study week, read How to learn French fast. For verb forms worth a card, see French tenses, explained.

How do you use the flashcards on this page?

Type one card per line: the French, an equals sign, then the meaning. A tab works too. Lines with no equals sign are skipped, and the tool says how many. It keeps up to 300 cards.

Press Save cards, then Start a round. Try to answer before you press Show answer, then pick Knew it or Not yet. Tick Show the meaning first to go from the meaning to the French.

You can edit the list and save again. A card you did not change keeps its box, a changed card starts again in box 1, and a deleted line is removed.

New cards start in box 1. Knew it moves a card up one box, as far as box 5. Not yet sends it back to box 1. The tool counts rounds, not days, and skips ahead when the next round would have no cards due. When you start a round is up to you.

How do French flashcards work best?

French flashcards work best when you try to recall the answer before you look, and keep doing so after you first get it right. Two studies support this for their own participants.

In a 2006 study, students read prose passages, then either took free-recall tests without feedback or restudied the passages [1]. On a final test after 5 minutes, restudying gave better recall [1]. After 2 days and after 1 week, prior testing produced substantially greater retention, even though restudying made students more confident [1].

In a 2008 study in Science, students learned foreign language vocabulary words [2]. In some conditions, once a word was recalled correctly, it was dropped from testing but studied again, or dropped from study but tested again [2]. Repeated studying after that point had no effect on delayed recall; repeated testing produced a large positive effect [2]. Students’ predictions of their own performance were uncorrelated with how they did [2].

For a deck, that means: say the answer before you flip, and do not retire a card the first time you know it. In the tool, a known card moves to a box that comes up less often. It does not disappear.

How do the boxes on this page work?

The boxes on this page sort your cards by how well you know them. In this tool, a card you know moves up to the next box, which comes up less often, and a card you miss goes back to box 1. Each box comes up half as often as the one before it, as the table above shows.

A 2019 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences names the Leitner system as a spaced repetition method for reviewing flashcards, and as where the history of designing spaced repetition schedules starts [5]. This page does not describe how that method works. The box rules above are this tool’s own.

What should go on a French flashcard?

A good French flashcard holds one thing you met in real French, with enough context to recall it. These are general suggestions, not findings from the studies above.

• One item per card. One word or short phrase on the front, its meaning on the back.
• Where you met it. A useful shape is “word = meaning, plus a sentence you met it in”, copied from the book, article or show.
• The exact spelling. Copy the word as your source writes it, accents included.
• Nouns with their article. Write a noun with the article you saw it with, so its gender comes along.
• Verb forms you need. One form per card, in a tense you keep meeting. French tenses, explained shows what each tense is for.
• Your own words. Cards from what you read and hear come with a memory attached; a list of words you never met does not.

To practise producing French, not only recognizing it, tick Show the meaning first.

How often should you review French flashcards?

Review a card after a gap, and let the gap grow with how long you need to remember it. Two papers on spacing support that idea for the material their participants learned.

A 2006 review of distributed practice in verbal recall tasks pooled 839 assessments from 317 experiments in 184 articles [3]. The gap between sessions that gave the best retention grew as the delay before the final test grew [3].

A 2008 study taught more than 1,350 people a set of facts, reviewed them after a gap of up to 3.5 months, and tested them up to 1 year later [4]. As the gap grew, final performance first rose, then slowly fell [4]. As a share of the test delay, the best gap fell from about 20 to 40% for a 1-week delay to about 5 to 10% for a 1-year delay [4].

Those figures describe facts those participants learned, not a French schedule. The plain reading: if you need the words for months, spread reviews over weeks, not one sitting. The boxes stretch the gap for cards you know.

Should you use paper French flashcards or an app?

Either can work: both let you recall before you flip and come back after a gap. Paper lets you sort cards into real boxes. An app keeps the schedule for you. The table describes two apps only as their own pages do. It is not a ranking.

The tool here is the plainest of the three: no audio, no sync, one device.

Common mistakes

• Flipping before you try. In the 2006 study, recall tests beat restudying after 2 days and 1 week [1].
• Dropping a card after one right answer. In the 2008 study, repeated testing after a correct answer helped delayed recall; repeated studying did not [2].
• Doing every review in one sitting. The best gap grew with how long the material had to be kept [3][4].
• Reading box counts as a level. The boxes count your clicks. For what published figures say about learning time, see How long does it take to learn French.
• Trusting a method page, including this one. Research and app pages are updated. Compare each source page’s own date with the date at the top of this one.

See also: days of the week in French and months in French and food in French.

Sources