The Packbat flashcard technique

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Okay, so, the trick is this: each time you study from your stack of paper flashcards, you follow these steps.

1. Lift the number of flashcards you want to study right now off the top of the pile.
2. Shuffle your small study pile. (We like to flip one half of the stack upside-down with each shuffle, so which side up the cards are is randomized.)
3. Go through each card one by one, practicing. Each time you finish a card, if you feel confident about it, put it on the bottom of the original pile, and if you want to bone up on it more, put it on the top of the original pile. (Optionally, you could put some in the middle.) If you get a card wrong, put it lower in your study pile so you can try again in a little bit.
4. When the study pile is empty, put away the original pile (that now has all your cards again).

What this means is that, as long as you're taking more cards off the top than you put back on the top, you always go through the cards that you need to learn, and you slowly but consistently cycle through the cards you know. That means you're reviewing all your old cards while learning your new ones, while only studying as many cards at a time as you're comfortable with.

It's not the scientific system that the scientific science-based flashcard programs use, but we hate all those programs because our memory is a sieve and those things don't care if we want to study more or not. This lets us decide what we've learned and what we haven't, and it's dead simple.