Why typing beats flashcards for spelling

Turn a flashcard over and your brain does something easy: it checks whether the answer looks familiar. Write the same word out and it has to do something much harder — commit to every letter, in order, before it gets any feedback at all.

Those are different skills, and only one of them is scored on a written paper.

The "I sort of knew that" trap

The feeling of recognising an answer is almost indistinguishable from the feeling of knowing it. That is what makes flashcards so pleasant and so misleading: a deck can feel finished while your ability to produce any of it from nothing is still near zero.

Writing removes the ambiguity. There is no partial credit for nearly recognising a word you have to spell.

Diacritics are letters, not decoration

In Lithuanian, ą, č, ę, ė, į, š, ų, ū and ž are not accents on a letter you already know. Flipping a card teaches you that a word "has some marks on it". Writing it teaches you which, and where. The same holds for any language with a script you cannot fake.

Where flashcards still earn their place

This is not an argument against them. Recognition is the first rung — the point where a word goes from noise to something you have met, and cards are the fastest way to get there. The mistake is stopping there. A word you can recognise is a word you are ready to start learning to write.

Try it tonight, on paper

Take twenty words you are confident about. Write each one from its translation, without looking. Mark the ones you got exactly right — diacritics included. Most people find a third of their "known" words fail this, and those thirty per cent are where the next hour of study should go.