How many flashcards do you go through over that 5 minutes? I create so many lingqs these days that I’m afraid I’d need to start each day with 200 flashcards and even then I’d have difficulties with encountering everything.
If you both create so many Lingqs every day, why one has here only 1586 English words and the other 5081?
What about flasshcards, Grigo, you can chose on your profile page to receive daily 25 or 50 words. I receive 25 words every day but in 7 languages!..
And 5 minutes are for me enough to repeat 7x25= 175 words.
And I affirm again: if you don’t want to use flashcards - don’t use!.. Nobody makes you use them.
But then you have to find another way to memorize words because without words it’s just impossible to speak!
I was just curious how many flashcards you do, I don’t really plan on doing them myself.
And I have only 5k known words in English because I don’t use lingq to learn English. That’s just from the past when I read a couple of articles. I use lingq mainly for Spanish and I’ve just recently came back to the site and did reset my progress for this language. Also, creating many lingqs doesn’t have to mean I must make all of them as ‘known’ immediately. I created over 800 lingqs this week but I felt comfortable with making only ~90 of them to be the known words.
Cheers
I find that the more LingQs I create, the faster I progress in the language. The reason is simple. The more LingQs I have created, the more I have read and the more I have listened, AND the more I have paid attention to new words and phrases (in order to LingQ them) AND the more I will pay attention to them in my future reading and listening (when I see them as yellow LingQs, and maybe change their status).
So the number of LingQs is a great indicator that I am progressing. I don’t worry about how many LingQs there are, nor the impossibility of going through them or reviewing them deliberately. That will all happen naturally as I continue reading and listening. And lo and behold suddenly my known words count is up and I understand difficult texts that I didn’t understand before.
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I’ve noticed this as well. When first starting out here, I thought to myself: “Why make so many LingQs? You can only learn so many words in a day.”
Well, turns out, I make all the LingQs in my lesson and it makes reading it much easier when take time to LingQ each word to one’s preference (from a dictionary or depending on the context).
That being said, I think reviewing all your LingQs (assuming one makes upwards of 100+ LingQs a day?) as flashcards seems like a cumbersome task.
Both are SRS. Anki is more customizable and allows you to micromanage statistics, time between review sessions. A real pain in the neck to use, but quite neat once you figure it out.
Memrise is just SRS, but requires you to type your answer exactly. Very easy to use, but picky when it comes to typing in your answer. If you get the answer wrong (even by one letter) in your review session, the cards pop up more often until you get it right.
The universal key to language learning is dedicated time and interest. So, if flash cards are truly “utterly depressing”, I wouldn’t push yourself to do them and then get burnt out.
However, there are ways to use them sparingly! And their desired effects can be achieved through other methods.
If you’re learning Chinese, my questions would be:
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How familiar are you with the written language? Do you practice handwriting characters? Are you somewhat familiar with character radicals? Flash cards can build memorization ability, but so can writing and understanding radicals. It would also be useful to have a solid foundation in the most commonly used 500-800 characters. (You learn more about how words are formed if you’re introduced to this base, for instance, if you know “者” is added to the end of characters to mean “a person who is” then you can recognize “作者” means writer, " 受害者" means “the one who receives harm/damage” aka victim, etc.)
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How easy is it for you to memorize words? How long does it normally take you to recall both the pronunciation and meaning of characters? Flashcards can be useful for any learner who isn’t used to matching pinyin with characters yet, or has difficulty recalling meaning immediately. If you’re listening AND reading carefully, and seeing progress, this might not be a big problem.
I personally can’t stand rogue-memorizing flashcards. Just reviewing hundreds of words that aren’t connected to any context does not help me. I’ve been able to build vocabulary naturally through reading by seeing new words in different contexts and being interested in the content. However, I often review flash cards for specific lessons. For instance: I’ll read a text & lingq new words at night. Then I’ll listen while reading. The next morning I’ll review just the lingqs via flash cards, making sure I know the key words. And I’ll read the text again. I find I can retain more words with a bit of content-based flash card work. But it’s important to also note that I don’t get upset or frustrated if I can’t remember a word. I just accept that forgetting some is a natural part of accumulation. Everything should be relatively stress-free.
You are not alone !
I do hate flash cards, I tried Anki and Lingq flash card for a while but I felt as a waste of time.
It’s not laziness 
but learning a new language MUST be fun and if it’s not, it’s pointless.
SRS systems are great for cramming.
If you are a student and having a test coming soon, using flash cards is efficient for a short term memory. At least in MY case.
I find million times better ( and effective) to listen to lot of differents sources (mostly youtube, internet, TV)
If you don’t like flash cards, give up unscrupulous and do smth more enjoyable !
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I find flashcards really useful for me.
In my opinion though one thing is crucial if you want to make flashcards work for you - you need to create the flashcards yourself. What I find enjoyable and effective is creating my own flashcards.
Sure, there are plenty of flashcard sets available on the net but studying them is nt really effective.
When I read a good novel on my Kindle I add all the new words to my Anki deck. When I watch a new movie on Netflix I note down new words or idioms. All the flashcards remind me fragments of a book I just read or some scenes from a movie I just saw.
It’s WAY more effective than studying flashcards created by someone else.
It’s been like forever since I first heard from you about that but I just can’t make myself to give it a go 
I watch a lot of stuff (from Netflix too) and I read a lot on my Kindle as well so there would be tons of words I could use.
I like Mayamarie’s point about content-based flash card work. That’s why I use tags on LingQ to make particular sets of words and phases that are especially relevant to me. For example, I tag words that I find difficult to pronounce as “pronounce”, words and phrases that I think will be of immediate help to me in my current conversations as “cool”, and words that just don’t seem to stick as “mustmaster”. I think that helps cut down on the level of boredom.
Just give it a try one day. 
If it doesn’t work for you… well, it’s just one of many methods of getting new words into your head.
Anyway my first month of Netflix just ended. It was free but now I just subscribed to premium. One of the reasons for doing so was to improve my English and Spanish (there are quite a lot of movies with Spanish audio).
I might but the idea of taking a few moments to note down a word every x minutes isn’t that appealing to me I remember I tried something like that out of necessity when I was starting to watch Suits and wasn’t familiar with that jargon lawyers use. Now that I’m perfectly familiar with it I no longer need any translations.