There seems to be reasonable consensus that for #languageLearning, putting images on the front of flashcards is a decent idea for increased memorisation and reduced reliance on translation. Obviously this doesn't work at all for #blind people.

Does anyone have any resources on the efficacy of an audio-based alternative? For example, if I'm trying to acquire the Spanish term for "washing machine," is it at all useful to have the front of the card play a short sound from a spin cycle?

I'm interested in any resources exploring and evaluating this as a technique, as well as practical experiences or guides from people who've done this.

#language #accessibility

@jscholes I learned Spanish with Comprehensible Input and while visual content was important early on to understand what the people were talking about, once I had bootstrapped well enough to understand a basic conversation, 95%+ of my learning has been pure audio with no visual cues.

I think people like to use visual clues to try to avoid translating, but most concrete nouns are so simple you'll never have that problem and you will always remember them. Where you want to avoid translating is stuff like, "Let's meet at 8" because you are in danger of saying stuff like, "Vamos a conocernos (meet for the first time) a las ocho" instead of "Vamos a juntarnos (get together) a las ocho", but those subtle distinctions are annoyingly hard to capture in flash cards, sighted or not.

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@jscholes I suspect, that given that you live in Mexico, you are well past the point where visual references would be particularly helpful even if you could see them.

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