Why spaced review works
The evidence for spacing and retrieval is strong — stronger than any claim about a particular deck design.
Cepeda and colleagues’ quantitative review (2006) found robust benefits from distributing practice over time. Karpicke and Roediger (2008) found that repeated retrieval improved delayed recall more than simply restudying material after it had been learned. Those studies support two principles: don’t mass all review into one sitting, and make yourself retrieve the answer rather than only rereading it.
Card types
What should go on a Latin notecard?
Useful when you repeatedly fail to recognize a common word. Avoid memorizing a long dictionary entry instead of the sense you keep meeting.
Useful when you know the word in isolation but miss it inflected. Don’t make the sentence so long it tests everything at once.
Useful when morphology is the bottleneck. Don’t turn every ending into an abstract paradigm drill.
Useful when a phrase or construction is worth revisiting as a unit, not just a translation.
A whole book’s vocabulary as a deck
Don’t hand-copy a book’s vocabulary into a separate system.
Where a book supports it, LC can turn its vocabulary into a review deck. That doesn’t mean memorizing the entire deck before opening the book — open the book and read, let real difficulty tell you which words deserve extra attention, then use the book deck for broader preparation or systematic review.
Avoid the “deck as hobby” trap. If your queue grows faster than your Latin, reduce what you save. The best card isn’t the one with the most fields — it’s the one that helps you recognize something faster next time it appears in a sentence.
Sources & further reading