/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Whatever patterns you strengthen will become your habits. In fact, that's the basic principle you're counting on with those flashcards, isn't it? That's really the whole point, right? You're repeating something, with the explicit intent that it gets burned into your brain.
But what if the very thing you were working to make stronger just happened to be a habit that was actually slowing you down? What if you were working to make a hurdle stronger?
>Seeing the word in one language, answering with the translation
It's making you slow. It makes you think slowly, hear slowly, speak slowly. You see 食べれる, connect it to 食べる, then have to translate that to eat.
The other bad side-effect of learning from flashcards is that they encourage you to believe in one-to-one translation. They make you narrow-minded and unaware of the language you think you're learning. When you learn a foreign word and an English word together, and burn them together in your mind as a pair, you create the illusion of a world where every language is exactly the same, just with different words. But that world doesn't actually exist.
Also, 食べる, 食べた, etc., are all held in the same lexeme but they are stored as separate word-forms, and each word-form is stored separated from each other. You can't just learn 食べる, some grammar rules, and automatically have all of the forms in your head. You need to learn them all separately.

Nobody should ever use flash cards for anything, and extensive grammar study is bad too.