Learning English with a flashcard app: false friends up to C1

For most Germans, English is not a fresh start but a plateau. You understand series, read Reddit, get through every meeting. Then you write “I become a coffee” in an email, or you sit in the Cambridge C1 writing exam and only “very important” comes to mind. The problem is rarely grammar. It is the words you almost know.

This page is for exactly that almost. For the principle behind vocabulary cards in general, read Learning vocabulary with checkst.

Where you stand and where you want to go

In the Abitur, the KMK educational standards for English are oriented to B2, partly C1. Cambridge writes that many students in grades 12 and 13 in Germany take the C1 Advanced exam. For study abroad, universities often require TOEFL or IELTS.

The CEFR does not specify how many words are needed. As a rough scale, Milton measured with a test of the 5,000 most frequent English words:

These are research reference values, not thresholds. Other presentations give already different values for B1. But they show that between B2 and C1 there are not ten thousand words, but rather a few hundred to a thousand, and those are the ones you should learn deliberately.

The four traps for German speakers

False friends. German Gift is poison, English gift is a present. Bekommen is get, become means werden. The BBC explicitly recommends word cards with an example sentence on the back. And that is exactly what a card is good for: it forces you to actively retrieve the correct meaning before your brain guesses in German.

Phrasal verbs. The particle changes the meaning: call off means cancel. In addition, there is whether the verb may be separated or not. You do not learn that from a list, but sentence by sentence.

Collocations. Learners transfer patterns from their mother tongue, and make versus do is the classic example. It is make a decision, take a break, give advice. A single word on the card helps you little here. Learn the whole combination.

Pronunciation. According to a British Council guide, German speakers struggle mainly with /θ/ and /ð/ as in think and these, with /w/ versus /v/, and with the hardening of /b d g/ at the end of words.

Your workflow with checkst

1. Choose a base. According to Oxford, the Oxford 3000 covers important words from A1 to B2, and the Oxford 5000 adds 2,000 more at B2 and C1. The lists are freely available; there is no official Anki deck for them. On AnkiWeb you will find community decks, for example “4000 Essential English Words”. You import these as .apkg into checkst. But check yourself whether the cards are good; nobody has certified their quality.

2. Your own mistakes are the best deck. When you stumble over a word in a text, an email or a corrected exam, make a card from it. Photograph the page, and checkst extracts the text via text recognition. Or have card suggestions generated from an article, on the device or with your own OpenAI key, and keep only the words you really did not know.

3. Learn productively what you want to write. For C1 Writing or IELTS essays, understanding a word is not enough. For collocations and phrasal verbs, create cards in the direction German to English. A gap-fill works particularly well: “to ___ a decision”.

4. Listen. checkst’s speech output reads the English side aloud. Set it to English for the English field, and you hear every word on every repetition. And say the answer out loud, especially for think and these.

5. Let FSRS do the work. checkst schedules your repetitions with FSRS. According to the Anki manual, the default target retention is 90 percent. When an exam is coming up, you can go higher, but the manual advises against going above 97 percent. If you did not know a word, press “Again”, not “Hard”.

Example cards

The first two cards go from English to German, because you mainly misunderstand these words when reading. The last two go from German to English, because you want to use them yourself.

What the research says

The 2022 meta-analysis by Kim and Webb summarizes 48 experiments with 3,411 participants: distributed practice had a medium to large effect on second-language learning, and longer gaps worked better for later tests than shorter ones. Whether the gaps stayed the same or grew made no measurable difference. A study testing a specific deck or FSRS specifically with German learners of English does not exist.

Limitations

• Cards do not train conversation. You practise speaking with people and writing with feedback.
• No exam simulation. checkst has no Cambridge or IELTS practice tests.
• No English deck of its own. You import or build your own.
• Apple only. iPhone and iPad, no Android, no web app.