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Comment by b9a2cab5 | Hacker News Reader

> Fancy apps are not needed

Not sure if Anki counts as fancy, but it certainly is orders of magnitude more efficient than taking notes or active reading. See also: Make It Stick [1]. If you're trying to memorize content spaced repetition is unmatched. I've durably memorized entire 300-page programming design books (e.g. Effective Java) in under a month of 30 min/day reading+Anki usage.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18770267-make-it-stick

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I wouldn't say it's more effective, but rather that it's a great addition to note taking and active reading. Those activities are what drive my Anki use (or flashcards in general, though my use of physical cards has essentially dropped to zero, I sometimes make them but turn them into Anki notes within a week). But Anki itself is "just" a mechanism for automating the review and tracking of those notes and flashcards. You could (and I have) done the same thing with a stack of physical index cards.

Blindly entering data into Anki without a base comprehension is not a terribly effective way to understand it. You could turn an entire encyclopedia into Anki cards and memorize it, but never properly connect the dots between the things you've learned.

I'm also using flashcards and the Anki app to memorise syntax. I got sick of looking up the difference between list.append and list.extend and all kinds of small things. Hope it helps...

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