Flashcards with pictures

Adding pictures to vocabulary flashcards feels like it should work, and it often does. The research shows that the kind of picture matters, and so does who made it. Swapping a translation for a stock photo, on its own, does little for adults.

What pictures do well

Your memory holds onto pictures better than words. That’s one of the oldest findings in memory research, the picture superiority effect: people shown pictures remember more of them than people shown the same things as words (Paivio, 1971; Nelson et al., 1976). One explanation is that a picture is stored twice, as an image and as words, so it has two ways back.

For a new word, a picture can also link the meaning straight to the foreign word, without going through your own language first (Comesaña et al., 2009). That study was with children, but it’s the same idea behind “think in the language” advice.

Where pictures don’t help

For adults learning foreign words, studies that swap a translation for a stock picture haven’t found the picture doing better. Dutch adults learning Italian did better with the translation than with a picture (Lotto & de Groot, 1998). And learners shown pictures for Swahili words felt they were learning better, without actually remembering more (Carpenter & Olson, 2012).

So a generic picture of a dog next to perro is pleasant, and does little more than the translation would. Keep the meaning on the card as well.

What makes a picture card stick

The pictures that work hardest are the ones with you in them. Each of these has strong research behind it:

• It means something to you. Things related to yourself are remembered better than things processed any other way (Symons & Johnson, 1997), and that holds for learning foreign words too (Pruss et al., 2025). Your own cat eating rice beats a stock photo of rice.
• You chose it. What you come up with yourself is remembered better than what you’re handed (Slamecka & Graf, 1978).
• You’re in it. Imagining yourself in a scene boosts memory more than other strategies (Grilli & Glisky, 2010).
• Things are happening. Pictures where things interact are remembered better than pictures of things side by side. Making them weird doesn’t add anything; making them interact does (Wollen et al., 1972).
• It contains a hook to the sound. A thing in the picture that sounds like the word links the picture back to how the word sounds. That’s the keyword method: see memory hooks.

Making picture cards in Anki

If you’re adding pictures in Anki, a few things make them work harder:

1. Pick or make a picture that means something to you. The first image search result rarely does.
2. Put something in it that sounds like the word, and make it interact with the meaning.
3. Keep the meaning and the word’s audio on the card too, so the picture is an extra route back.
4. Use the same picture both ways: from the word to the picture, and from the picture to the word.

All of that takes time. Finding or making a personal picture for every word, thousands of times, is the part almost nobody keeps up.

How Flashfriend does it

Flashfriend makes that quick. For each word you pick a place you know for its first sound, and a scene from a phrase that sounds like it, or write your own, and Flashfriend paints the picture. Describe yourself once and you’re in the scenes. In Mandarin the picture carries the tone’s colour, and in Spanish the noun’s gender.

Every card keeps the word’s meaning and audio next to the picture, as the research above suggests. You’re tested both ways round, from the word to the picture and from the picture to the word, just before you’d forget it. Once you know enough words, sentence cards join your picture cards, each with one new word, and grammar arrives one pattern at a time. See all the memory techniques behind every card, or compare Flashfriend with Anki.