It’s a spaced repetition system that focuses on incremental reading. It’s like Anki, but instead of hosting flashcards separately from your reading, you extract text while reading documents and PDFs. You later refine extracts into ever-smaller chunks of knowledge, at which point you create the “flashcard” (usually ‘clozes’, demonstrated below).
Here’s a Wikipedia article I pasted into SuperMemo. Blue bits are the extracts, which it’ll remind me to refine into flashcards later.
A cloze deletion flashcard. It’s easy to make a lot of these. I like them.
Incremental reading is nice because you can come back to information over time as you learn more, instead of having to understand enough to make an Anki card right away.
In the context of this post, I’m reading some of the papers, making extracts, making flashcards from the extracts, and retaining at least one or two key points from each paper. Way better than retaining 1-2 points from all 70 summaries!
I’ve been wanting to try SuperMemo for a while, especially given the difficulty that you mention with making Anki cards. But it doesn’t run natively on linux AFAIK, and I can’t be bothered for the moment to make it work using wine.
I agree. I’ve put it in my SuperMemo and very much look forward to going through it. Thanks Peter & Owen!
I’m curious what “put it in my SuperMemo” means. Quick googling only yielded SuperMemo as a language learning tool.
It’s a spaced repetition system that focuses on incremental reading. It’s like Anki, but instead of hosting flashcards separately from your reading, you extract text while reading documents and PDFs. You later refine extracts into ever-smaller chunks of knowledge, at which point you create the “flashcard” (usually ‘clozes’, demonstrated below).
Incremental reading is nice because you can come back to information over time as you learn more, instead of having to understand enough to make an Anki card right away.
In the context of this post, I’m reading some of the papers, making extracts, making flashcards from the extracts, and retaining at least one or two key points from each paper. Way better than retaining 1-2 points from all 70 summaries!
I’ve been wanting to try SuperMemo for a while, especially given the difficulty that you mention with making Anki cards. But it doesn’t run natively on linux AFAIK, and I can’t be bothered for the moment to make it work using wine.
Apparently VMs are the way to go for pdf support on linux.