Aug 26, 2026 · 32 min · 12 segments
👉 Grab your FREE Guide, Xiaoma’s 7 Best Tips for Learning Any Language: https://l.storylearning.com/xiaoma Today's guest, Xiaoma NYC, a.k.a Arieh Smith, probably needs no introduction. He first came…
Arieh SmithGuest
Olly RichardsHost
So a lot of people's ears would have pricked up when you said that you were just spending hours and hours a day on flashcards.
Do you think it was because it was a flashcard method as such? Or was it just more the fact that you just kind of brute forced something and that something happened to be flashcards? And with a language like Chinese, you do just have to put in at some point a massive amount of work to get over that hump.
I mean, I was going to classes for hours a day, listening to nothing but Chinese for hours.
And so the flashcards, it was sort of supplemental time on top of everything else that I was doing in Chinese.
And I made a deliberate attempt to not have American friends, not listen to English language music the entire year.
So I don't want to overemphasize the importance of flashcards in my language learning routine.
I mean, the way that I see it, I use them to sort of reinforce everything else that I was doing.
So if I learned a sentence in class or if I heard an interesting sentence from a tutor or a friend, I would put it in my flashcards and memorize.
It reminds me a bit of how I tend to approach flashcards, which is almost like... it's almost not for the flashcards per se.
It's more that like, as you said, if I hear an interesting phrase or something, I want to remember it.
The logical place to write that down is in your flashcards because then you can easily get back to it.
It's almost like a kind of a more convenient alternative to a paper notebook just to act as a repository for things that you want to remember.
So a lot of people's ears would have pricked up when you said that you were just spending hours and hours a day on flashcards.
Do you think it was because it was a flashcard method as such? Or was it just more the fact that you just kind of brute forced something and that something happened to be flashcards? And with a language like Chinese, you do just have to put in at some point a massive amount of work to get over that hump.
I mean, I was going to classes for hours a day, listening to nothing but Chinese for hours.
And so the flashcards, it was sort of supplemental time on top of everything else that I was doing in Chinese.
And I made a deliberate attempt to not have American friends, not listen to English language music the entire year.
So I don't want to overemphasize the importance of flashcards in my language learning routine.
I mean, the way that I see it, I use them to sort of reinforce everything else that I was doing.
So if I learned a sentence in class or if I heard an interesting sentence from a tutor or a friend, I would put it in my flashcards and memorize.
It reminds me a bit of how I tend to approach flashcards, which is almost like... it's almost not for the flashcards per se.
It's more that like, as you said, if I hear an interesting phrase or something, I want to remember it.
The logical place to write that down is in your flashcards because then you can easily get back to it.
It's almost like a kind of a more convenient alternative to a paper notebook just to act as a repository for things that you want to remember.
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