[wenc]

If you google around, you'll find many descriptions of knowledge domains where flashcards either don't work or aren't efficient.

My layman's take is that flashcards are based on the idea of forcing retrieval through a trigger. It seems to me that atomicity is an inherent assumption, as well as independence, and that each flashcard maps to a finite set of deterministic answers. Feelings or a sense of things aren't as easily encoded. Tabular/graph relationships aren't as easily encoded either, and likewise sequences of decision trees aren't easily encoded. One can presumably design a chained sequence of cards complete with decision trees, but at this point flashcards end up being an unwieldy paradigm.

Fortunately one doesn't need limit oneself to flashcards. There are other methods like the method of loci etc. that work great for say, sequenced knowledge, like speeches or lyrics to a song, areas in which flashcards aren't the most natural fit.

To me however, memory is but one tool out of many for understanding something. I personally tend not to focus on memory itself too much. For the kind of stuff I'm interested in, memory is an outcome actually doing stuff, getting thing wrong, and then internalizing. In language learning, the memory that comes from embarrassment from making faux pas is both more quickly assimilated and retained longer than via SRS. I still remember mistakes made years ago even though they only happened once or twice.