I personally find production cards to help my recall a lot more than recognition. I used to do just recognition for a long time, then I switched to both, and then finally I mostly use production now.
The key to production cards is figuring out how to format them correctly, I use images from games and manga with cloze deletion now and I'm pretty happy with it but I still have to refine it. For example if the scenes in a game aren't unique enough it will create problems down the line. I also blur character cutouts when they are present to avoid association with them.
Another tip if you do decide to use production cards is to use only one word in English and not every meaning for the word, for me this will be the use that's shown in the image. I agree with yogert about cards not really being good for learning every usage and I find that comes with encountering it in the wild. So instead of trying to capture every meaning with a single card I try to create a memory hook similar to the keywords used in RTK.
EDIT: I missed that this was about the core set. I stand by production but you might have to edit those cards to make them more memorable because the pictures are bad and there are some English definitions that probably won't stick.
The key to production cards is figuring out how to format them correctly, I use images from games and manga with cloze deletion now and I'm pretty happy with it but I still have to refine it. For example if the scenes in a game aren't unique enough it will create problems down the line. I also blur character cutouts when they are present to avoid association with them.
Another tip if you do decide to use production cards is to use only one word in English and not every meaning for the word, for me this will be the use that's shown in the image. I agree with yogert about cards not really being good for learning every usage and I find that comes with encountering it in the wild. So instead of trying to capture every meaning with a single card I try to create a memory hook similar to the keywords used in RTK.
EDIT: I missed that this was about the core set. I stand by production but you might have to edit those cards to make them more memorable because the pictures are bad and there are some English definitions that probably won't stick.
Edited: 2016-03-25, 2:43 pm