Sentence Cards vs Word Cards for Language Learning

Use both. Word cards are fast: you can review dozens in a few minutes, and they're the quickest way to build basic vocabulary. Sentence cards are slower but teach what word cards can't: word order, grammar, which words go together, and which meaning is meant.

What word cards are good for

• Learning lots of vocabulary quickly, especially concrete nouns.
• Characters and scripts: hiragana, katakana, Chinese characters.
• Words with one clear meaning: la puerta, door.

What sentence cards are good for

• Grammar words with no single translation: Chinese 了, Spanish se, French en.
• Verb forms, which change with the subject and tense.
• Speaking: if the card shows English and asks for the whole sentence in the target language, you are practising production, not only recognition.

A practical mix

A common approach is to start with words, then move to sentences once the most common few hundred words are familiar, because sentences full of unknown words are frustrating. Frequency-ordered decks make this easier: the words in the first sentences are the ones you learned first.

In Decks, every language has both kinds: for example Spanish Frequency 5000 (words with an example sentence) and Beginner Spanish Sentences (whole sentences, English first); Chinese Frequency 5000 and Chinese Frequency Sentences; French Frequency 500 and French Sentences.

Rate sentence cards on meaning

On a sentence card, small slips aren't the point. If you produced the sentence with the right meaning and grammar and only differed in a word order the language allows, that's Good. Save Again for real misses.