| > if I have to learn hundreds of pages of math, there is no other way than creating my own lecture notes, basically Well, that is what I actually did with Anki in university. For any lecture, I would go over the material, identify the important snippets, and make them into Anki cards. Creating the deck itself is very productive work because to identify the cards and make them small enough, you have to have understood the material. If you just copy the entire page-long proof in, you haven't understood it. Anki forces you to break it down because a card like that is useless. So if you're already making your own notes why would you want flashcard software? - It optimizes reviewing, ensuring you look at forgotten cards every day, and easy ones only once a year, instead of randomly poring over the entire set of notes and hoping to stumble upon the forgotten ones. - It allows higher card quality, e.g. I can paste screenshots of visualizations instead of scribbling them down. My language decks have audio pronounciation, a paper medium does not support that. - It allows higher card volume, I can't fit 10000 cards in a notebook but I can do so on my phone. Especially not high-quality cards with images in them. Of course nobody even considers fitting 10k cards on paper because reviewing such a collection is not feasible without spaced repetition software (see two paragraphs above). - Its much easier to pull out my phone and do some reviews in the car or public transit than to do the same with a notebook. |