Flashcards

<2022-Feb-07>

Network

Make cards that refer to other cards, by mentioning (in passing) a keyword that is the test question for another card. For clozes, this is a bit difficult because the "test question" is an entire sentence or paragraph, but you can reuse specific turns of phrase or reuse references to third-party concepts, e.g. to a person.

• This is probably useful for linking "sequences" of concepts, that you can use to explain a Big Idea to someone else without losing your train of thought. However, make a general habit of networking cards in this way and you can explain anything, not just a specific sequence.

Importing others' work

• Be brutal with rejecting bad cards. In Anki, the hotkey for suspending a card is @, press it liberally. This can be good practice because you should also be brutal with your own cards.
• Don't forget to tag all imported cards as such, even if you edit them. Give each source a tag of its own.
• See importing as an incremental process. If at any point you want to stop seeing cards from another's deck, you can still keep the cards you liked so far by filtering that deck for the cards with a due date (b/c you've reviewed them), and moving those to your main deck.

Multi-pass reading

You may feel overwhelmed by the spectre of "processing" an entire book, an entire blog archive, or some other collection of material, into flashcards. You can sidestep perfectionist paralysis by processing it beginning-to-end in multiple passes.

• 2022-02-07
• 2022-01-13
• Artifact: Anki-editor