How should I make flash cards for words with multiple meanings?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I am learning Danish as a foreign language using English as the "base". I am at the very beginning of it and I found using flashcards (with Anki) very useful.

I have cards for both "directions", seeing the Danish word and having to "speak" the English equivalent, and seeing the English word and having to write down the Danish equivalent.

I have a problem, however, when the words have multiple meanings, e.g. multiple English words can be used for the same Danish word, or the other way around. An example would be "fly" which is both a verb and a noun and there are multiple Danish words for it. There are some cases when even the type is the same (synonyms). In these cases if I see e.g. a Danish word with multiple meanings, I don't know which English version I should say.

Is there any best practice to handle these words? If the type of the word differs (verb+noun) I can just write the type as a hint, but when it is the same for all the meanings then it doesn't help.

I am afraid that if I add some extra info (e.g. an example sentence) then it would affect the learning process and I won't be able to recall it without that context.