I've found Anki the best app to learn almost anythinf that requires memorization.
In my high school days, I saw a direct correlation between the amount of Anki studying I did, and my grade.
I am in high school and I had created anki notes for thermodynamics which are since lost but my friend used to say to do it in organic notes and I just ditched anki.
My organic chemistry is... terrible to say the least. I might try Anki again if you say so!
I add memory tricks (mostly mnemonics in this case) in that I learned from Dominic O'Brien [0] (I think some of his work has PDFs available) in order to juice the process a bit (helps with the tricky ones, and can make learning the new ones quicker if you do it from the get go)
I found it really great for quickly learning contents of a paper or books, my only gripe with anki is the integration between desktop and mobile, especially if you dont opt to sign in and getting things to sync was a pain in the ass. Hell even moving my deck from my old computer to new one wasnt straight forward
Could you talk about your method for breaking up the contents of papers and books into cards? I have a bunch of reading to catch up on for a midterm in a few weeks and I'm not sure how fine-grained to make my cards.
There is a category called incremental reading,you can find more elegant techniques if you look into it.
My method is more primitive, I first get a simple overview of the topic (LLMs are great at this). Once I have a feel , i flick through the material book/paper highlight important info that stands out or info that I want to remember and personally for me, Im not trying to understand things as I highlight, once I'm done a chapter or a big section, I pull out my anki and start making questions against the highlighted parts.
When Im making questions, usually I make one questions that corresponds directly and I use the highlighted part as the answer with minimum change expect for readability and then I make several other questions that takes different parts of the highlighted answer, so that I can have an almost lego like breakdown of questions that can help me recall the "bigger question", also I make sure the questions arent to direct and force my brain to think and retrieve the answer
My organic chemistry is... terrible to say the least. I might try Anki again if you say so!