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by mshekow 1803 days ago
In my experience (I have over 10k flashcards in Anki and SuperMemo) it takes a lot of time to create the cards (vs. repeating/learning them). But the main reason is because I have to take time to think about and understand the content first, reformulate it in my own words (otherwise it won't stick well!), and cut it into bite-sized cards. What helped me most were articles "teaching" how to do this, or generally the experiences of others [1] [2].

From scanning your product's landing page, it seems you focus a lot on the time-savings during card creation, by relying on copy-and-paste. I'm not sure this is the best way to learn more complex topics, but may work fine for very clear things that are already bite-sized in the source material (e.g. chemical formulas, or language vocabulary). Are you focusing on these use cases?

[1] https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24878171

2 comments

A lot of it isn't actually copy paste, but just quality-of-life tricks to speed up card creation while going through lecture notes / reading an article.

e.g. we have tooltips+hotkeys that let you append the highlighted text to the front/back.

One-click card creation for language vocab is on our roadmap and will be a focus-area soon. We're focusing on students / teachers right now.

Edit: You may like our guide too: https://zorbi.cards/making-good-flashcards (based on SuperMemo's original article - but summarised for the average K-12 student)

As you hinted at I think there are still cases where mass automated card creation is useful. I’ve had success doing this for Chinese characters - I ordered them by frequency and then made them into cards using the AnkiConnect API addon, then I feed in 5-10 new cards per day. There isn’t much creativity required in creating the cards since all the characters have definitions in Unihan.