Ideally these should be printed on card stock paper, duplex (meaning two-sided), and cut out using a paper cutter. I print them at my local print shop, Sukam Copy, at University and 7th, for $0.25/page. This translates to $5 per 100 words. They also have a paper cutter which you can use for free (but it is dull!). If you own a good duplex printer then you can buy your own card stock and print the cards at home for cheaper. If you don’t have card stock, you can use colored paper, which will help to hide what’s on the other side of the card. There is also the option of printing the cards single-sided and then gluing alternate sheets back-to-back.
It is best to use flashcards as part of a language course, so that once you have learned a word, you can have an opportunity to hear it pronounced, and to see it and use it in example sentences. If I try to learn words in isolation then I find that I have nothing to connect them to, and they are easily forgotten.
When studying with these cards I learn words Arabic to English first. To make sure new words are reinforced before moving out of short-term memory, you can take a few cards out of the deck and learn them together as a small group (the approach of memrise.com and eyeVocab). Or you can hold the full deck and insert each card just below the top until you’ve learned it well. As I go through the cards in this way, I try to guess how long I’ll be able to remember each word, and I insert it at a corresponding depth in the deck: unfamiliar or difficult words go close to the top, familiar or easy words go further down. When I feel I have mastered a word I put it at the bottom.
Eventually I can go through the deck in one pass and guess all the English words correctly. At that point I turn the deck over and learn the Arabic for each English word, which is harder. First it’s a matter of getting the sound approximately right, then the spelling - which of the vowels are long, which consonants are emphatic, etc. Sometimes I pull the top card and try to write the Arabic on a piece of paper, then I turn it over to see if I made any errors. Sometimes I just try to visualize the spelling, which is faster than writing the word out, but difficult for long words. I use a system similar to the one suggested in the Mastering Arabic textbook: if I pick up a card one day and get it right the first time, I put it in one of several “easy” stacks, which I eventually throw away.
Sometimes I use silly mnemonics to remember an Arabic word - if “big” is “kabīr” كَبير then I could think of a beer or a bear or something big. But I find that it is generally preferable to look up the word (I use Wiktionary) and get the definition and etymology, then we see that “kabīr” shares the same root as “ʾakbar” أَكْبَر meaning “greater” or “greatest”, a word that I already know from exposure to Islam. After doing this I use the word in sentences - not necessarily Arabic sentences, just as long as I’m using the Arabic for the word I’m trying to learn: “that’s a كَبير tree”, etc.
Last updated: 26 January 2019