How Much to Card

[hithereppl]

Hello, I’m a rising 9th grader who is looking to become a strong history and religion player in the upcoming season, ideally around April. My study source for the last couple of weeks during the summer has been carding, and I’ve developed a method to where I card roughly 5 hours a week during the school year while still getting in 2-3 hours of playing time. I would like to know for the specific tool of carding, how much time needs to be put in before significant results show up, and also how many high(ish) quality cards one needs to achieve these results.

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

No individual person's learning works this way or just has fixed guidelines where someone is going to be able to tell you a magical number of hours that's going to make things work for you. As a general principle flashcarding shouldn't be your main form of study with regards to learning new information but rather a method of retaining things that you may forget (primarily names, vocab type things).

[AGoodMan]

Definitely agree with Andrew here. This is why I personally don't find inheriting cards from other people to be very helpful, as cards tend to be most useful as a retention tool (i.e. not the "learning" tool) for facts that I had already learned to some degree via reading and taking notes.

In terms of more specific technique, this is a pretty helpful guide for using flashcards to study. I also wrote about flashcarding once before and it's a bit outdated (i.e. I didn't try cloze deleting at that point) but I think some nuggets still probably apply, in terms of diversifying your answerlines on a topic, etc. For history and religion at the HS level (and even beyond probably), you can't really go wrong with Anki + cloze deleting.

Everyone's carding style (and preexisting bases of knowledge) is so different so it's impossible to universally quantify how many cards would "get you" to national competitiveness. Once you start carding (especially from old packets), you'll also probably pick up a ton of clues by osmosis from repeatedly seeing them in questions. You may thus not need to turn them into cards to know them.

If I had to take a stab though, in very, very broad strokes I would venture to say that you probably need to get to at least the low thousands if you have little to no background in these areas (with a larger proportion of that being history than religion given quiz bowl's standard distribution). I am primarily only speaking from a broad sense of "magnitudes" here, that making like 200 history cards (assuming you limit the number of clues in each card) and stopping probably won't get you there.

The other thing I will really stress is that regularly reviewing cards is as important as making cards. It's a pretty frustrating experience in gameplay to know that you carded the clue you're hearing but you didn't internalize it enough to buzz on it.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

I'd add: If you are doing card stuff to a point that it doesn't feel enjoyable anymore, or the rewards that come from it don't feel worth the stress, there's no shame in scaling back or changing it up to other study methods that you find more fulfilling.