Comment by dambi0
Do you have any reasons for this beyond ease of reproducing portions of the text to drill yourself to remember it verbatim?
Do you have any reasons for this beyond ease of reproducing portions of the text to drill yourself to remember it verbatim?
Well yes perhaps I am confused, because if the cards strength lies in their ability to capture understanding beyond what is written in the text directly then the ability to create them via copying and pasting means that your claim that digital resources are superior to paper based ones because of this is lacking
The benefits are obvious to anyone who has used such a program. Consider for example a technique like the cloze deletion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloze_test
The question side of the card may be directly copied from the textbook, and read something like "An increase in the supply of a complementary good Y typically causes the price of good X to [...]." You can then correctly answer "decrease" or "lower" or "go down". You don't need exact phrasing, because you are grading the card yourself; and actually forming the cloze deletion is in most SRS programs a single keyboard shortcut away. This 10 second loop of copy, cloze delete, create gets you a huge amount of the benefit of learning and remembering the reasoning embedded within the sentence. Imagine trying to create a cloze deletion by hand - you'll be there for 2 minutes just copying the sentence.
The next level up is an image occlusion, where you actually screenshot an entire diagram, math equation, section of code, etc. and then selectively hide parts of it, asking yourself to fill in the blank. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1374772155
Image occlusions are close to trivial in a program like Anki once you've made a few. But they are, for all intents and purposes, impossible to make flashcards of unless you feel like drawing e.g. an anatomically correct human brain the same way 17 times in a row.
Yes. Over 12 years of use I have consistently found spaced repetition to be the most enjoyable way to learn basically anything, and essentially the only way to ensure things I don't regularly use as part of my job continue to be things I can remember. Some subjects I have in rotation at the moment: Finnish, Haskell, SQLite database internally, cash management and financial jargon, old photos and video clips of my childhood cat who I loved dearly.
But, more to the point: You seem confused as to the true generality of the technique. Flashcards can be used in much more interesting ways than just checking to see if you can recite all the lines of Homer correctly or something.
The vast majority of cards I have are questions of understanding - e.g. a card like "How many unique strands of DNA can be made from 100 A-T pairs and 100 C-G pairs?" You can't memorize all those digits. You need to remember how to solve the problem, which is quite simple, but not so simple it's worthless for a non-mathematician to solve without pen and paper.