The magic of MCDs comes from using super super simple cards to learn complex things.

The simplicity can’t be stressed enough.

Back in my misled ganbaru days of learning Japanese, I used to make cards for writing kanji compounds that looked like this:

FRONT:

りょうり

cooking

BACK:

料理

That doesn’t look so bad, does it? But it is. It’s a bad, bad card. Bad. This ↑ is not how to learn. Not effectively.

Never quiz yourself on two kanji at once. Unless you’re simultaneously writing with a pencil in your left hand and your right hand, you will never write two kanji at one time. No matter what you’re writing, whether it’s 元気 or 財団法人自治体国際化協会, you’re going to write it one kanji at a time.

After struggling with MCDs in the beginning, forum sempai 安藤 sees the light:

Once they finally clicked for me, it was like a new world opening up. … I honestly couldn’t see myself finally learning terms like 注意欠陥・多動性障害 or 朝鮮民主主義人民共和国 with the “traditional” sentence card format, but, as should be obvious from the fact that I totally just typed those out from memory, I can learn them super-easily now since instead of having one card with a nine kanji term I’ve gotta remember, I’ve got nine cards with one kanji to remember. 1/9th of the difficulty!

[link]

MCDs = Making hard stuff easy. Making you rock at [foreign language of choice].