[taopai]

I used to take endless notes on .org documents and build myself small wiki sites in django...

You know what makes the difference?

Take a walk, or catch a train and think about what you read. Find the main ideas and how the material relates to yourself. Play with it and ask yourself questions about it.

Then next day try to answer them in paper without extra material. And only after that reread the book to check or find unsolved the answers.

Learning is hard. There is nothing as easy learning. The good news is that it can be hand AND fun.

About reading:

Engage in every sentence, ask yourself what the writer is trying to tell you in every sentence, after that translate it to imagination and relate it with yourself and what you already know.

There is shallow reading and deep reading. Deep reading is a must for technical books, but also a joy for fiction. I still remember so vividly the coldness and texture of the walls of the hobbit's first mountain tunnels despite haven't been told about it.

[agumonkey]

> hand AND fun

I assume you meant hard and fun, and this is something I believe is the issue in adult life, things are unnecessarily hard when they could and should be hard AND fun

engagement, quality, innovation might rise by a lot if we focused jobs around that

[skydhash]

> Take a walk, or catch a train and think about what you read. Find the main ideas and how the material relates to yourself. Play with it and ask yourself questions about it.

This is the most important step. Read, then take a break. Practice, then take a break. During the break, mull over the ideas and do not rush to the next things. It’s that period of reflection which will bring new ideas.

About engagement, i tried to reread great fiction books or rewatch my favorite movies. When you no longer fascinated by the plot, you can enjoy the process that creates it.

[VoodooJuJu]

This is a truth about learning that people don't want to hear, but they need to hear it. Everyone wants to hear about magic productivity and learning hacks. They end up speed-reading and playing Anki, but they get nowhere. What's worse is they think they're getting somewhere, especially with the facade erected by games like Anki.

There are no shortcuts to learning and memorizing what you read. You have to really digest it, synthesize your own thoughts on it, and use it. You get out of it what you put into it.

[hareket]

While I respect your viewpoint, my personal experience significantly differs from that.

My familiarity with speed-reading is limited because I never deemed it worth, as I think reading should mostly be a slow pleasure, but Anki, like any well-designed spaced repetition routine, algorithm, or application, got me VERY far. I returned to high school as an adult and later attended university, which provided me with a variety of reference points to compare study techniques. Initially, I used conventional methods, but eventually, -- a few months in --, I discovered Anki. Not only did I start ranking among the top students, but I also completed both degrees in less time than typically required; something I never managed to do, no matter how hard I tried.

Recently, I've been experimenting with various study techniques, free from the constraints of formal education that could potentially bias the outcome, and I've observed a significant decline in my performance when I deviated from Anki or spaced repetition in general. Conversely, my performance improves when I reincorporate it. Mind you that I still have to put the required effort, carefully selecting what to memorize, and designing it well. You can't get away from that.

[skydhash]

Maybe the process is what got you there, not space repetition itself. Creating a moment of time to revisit concept is a core of all the successful methods I’ve seen.

[jbstack]

How do you know when is the optimal time for those revisits? Is it a week later, then a month later, then 6 months later? How do you make that decision? What method will you use to revisit? Will you locate the original book, find the right page, re-read the passage? Or perhaps you'll go to the right section in your notebook and re-read that?

Any time you do all of that you're essentially doing what Anki does but in a less efficient and less automated way. The point of Anki is (a) to make a reasonable decision on your behalf about when to revisit, and (b) to automate the process of retrieving and displaying the information which is being revisited.

[skydhash]

I don't really care about optimal. When the needs arise or my interest has renewed, I do what you said if I can't recall the exact things, I go back to the original source. I'm not really interested in memorizing random facts, I prefer everything to be connected in an organic manner, preferably based on my interest, needs, or context.

[hareket]

I've considered and accounted for it, but if I remove the spaced repetition part, it all falls apart, whatever the variation happens to be. At best it works in the short term, but after that, much of it becomes vague background noise.

[jbstack]

As someone who has reached a useful level of conversational ability in two languages, primarily because of Anki, I strongly disagree that using it gets you "nowhere". I don't have the luxury of language immersion (e.g. living abroad or interacting daily with native speakers). For me, Anki has enabled a level of vocab and grammar recall that I simply wouldn't achieve any other way. Arguably more importantly, it has given me an easy way to achieve the discipline of spending at least 30 minutes a day studying the language. I'm far more likely on a daily basis to think "I need to complete my Anki due cards today" than I am to proactively find 30 minutes every day to study using other methods. In the end, as the author of the article notes, a learning method which you actually use is better than a theoretically superior method which you don't get around to using.

I've found non-language topics to be more challenging. Whether or not a card is useful depends largely on how well written it is. You need to find the right wording which captures the essence of the point while remaining simplistic and atomic enough that the card doesn't become tedious to re-visit. I'd argue that the process of crafting the right card is equivalent to digesting it and synthesizing your own thoughts on it. I'd also argue that if you believe Anki positions itself as a "shortcut" then you've probably used it incorrectly. It is indeed true that you get out what you put in, and low-effort Anki cards will most likely end up being abandoned or deleted. Useful cards require effort, the same as any other learning/memorising technique.

[will5421]

* Learning from a book is hard

[taopai]

Books are awesome. Really.

But reading is the first step. You never learn only by reading. You have to relate the ideas with your prior knowledge and practice it or apply it somewhere.

You also have to get a nice book. And have to practice reading. Reading is a skill, it's an extension of imagination. You have to practice that, and reading is an awesome way.

[AlwaysRock]

This depends a lot on the person. I do not retain information that I read very well. I know this about myself so I try to ensure if I need to learn something I'm using other methods as my primarily way of learning.

My brother, and many others, have the ability to read something from a book and retain that information fairly well and without using some other method of learning or reinforcing it.

It's unfortunately that I didnt realize this until I was done with my schooling but its been really valuable to know this during my career.