style Flashcards

Fon flashcards: building vocabulary cards that stick

A good Fon vocabulary card doesn’t just hold two words facing each other. It holds a sound, a meaning and a situation. Here is how to build them — and how to review them without burning out.

schedule 5 min
style All levels
1
Structure

What a card should contain

Front: the Fon form with its exact diacritics. Back: the English translation and a sentence where the word is actually used. A card without a sentence produces dead vocabulary — recognized when reading, nowhere to be found in conversation.
KwabɔWelcome — said by the host to someone arriving
Agooexcuse me, may I
Kɛnklɛnplease
2
Spelling

Never simplify the characters

ɖ, ɛ, ɔ are not variants of d, e, o: they are letters in their own right. GB, KP and NY are single sounds, not two letters stuck together. A card that “normalizes” the spelling teaches you a word that doesn’t exist.
warning

Mark the tones from the very first card

á (high), à (low), ǎ (rising), â (falling). Adding them later means relearning the whole deck.

After the tools, the method: Parlons Fongbe Academy — 79 video lessons with a native speaker.Discover

3
Pace

Organizing your reviews

Ten new cards a day, no more. A 15-minute daily review, always at the same time. A card you miss three times in a row is a badly made card: rewrite it with a more concrete sentence instead of struggling with it.
Reviewing through play: Fon memory games
4
The sound

The problem flashcards don’t solve

You can write a perfect card and mispronounce the word for six months. The solution isn’t a better card, it’s a voice. In the Parlons Fongbe Academy, the 818 forms in the course are voiced by a native speaker from Cotonou, tone by tone, with their meaning on screen.
school

Flashcards + course

Cards maintain what the course has taught you to hear. The other way around, they don’t work.

Cards that speak

A useful Fon flashcard carries a sound and a situation. Without that, it just memorizes letters.

Un mɔ nu jɛ mɛ ǎ
« I don’t understand » — lesson 3.1
Parlons Fongbe Academy
The full course

Tools help you out. A method gets you talking.

Dictionaries, keyboards, translators: useful, but they don’t teach you to speak. 79 video lessons with a native speaker, in order, with tones taken seriously — that’s what the Academy does.

79 video lessons Native speaker from Cotonou Lifetime access, one payment
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Site offer · 80 000 instead of50,000 FCFA

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