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by kungtotte 2898 days ago
I've been sort of meta-learning for the past couple of weeks, reading about study methods and note taking and memory techniques, etc. and one prevailing theme regardless of the method is that repetition and rephrasing are key to internalise the information.

E.g. you learn and retain the information far more efficiently if you take the route of read -> write note -> create flashcards from the note. As opposed to autogenerating the flashcards from the source material, for example.

The process of formulating the note first and then formulating the flashcards means you have to actually think about the material in two stages instead of just performing data entry.

In my experience it doesn't take all that much time, and if you're really interested in learning a topic is it unreasonable to expect that you have to spend say 10% longer with any given book or article to perform this review process? If you spend a bit of time up front creating a structured approach and stick to it, it'll become very quick. Here's an interesting article as a reference: https://robertheaton.com/2018/06/25/how-to-read/