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Comment by a-dub | Hacker News Reader

Tried anki in college, found that creating the cards took too much time and doing them was boring.

What did work for me was really simple. A single 8 1/2 by 11 double sided sheet of paper could usually fit everything I needed to memorize at one given time. I'd write out a cheat sheet (a very valuable exercise in condensing and distilling while reviewing) and then reproduce it from memory before and after bed three days in a row allowing a tapered amount of cheating/peeking (with the first few being pretty much all peeking). After three days, it was pretty much good as memorized.

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and many years later?

As I understand it the benefit is to have strong recall over longer than just an exam or university course; more like for an entire career stage.

How far into your career are you, and how much of the material you learned in this way have you retained? Have you fairly tested the retention?

like anything it's use it or lose it. memorization works for short term, continued application in different settings is what makes it stick.

Memorization works well in the long term if you use flash cards, which was the point of the question.

This is just memorization through brute repetition without the SRS optimization. Less efficient, and more time consuming.

That's a bit harsh. As someone who regularly uses flash cards, creating them really is a bottleneck. It's a lot quicker to handwrite something on a paper. It's not as effective, but it definitely is faster.

Then get better at it. I'd constantly add 3 words real quick while I was in some restaurant's bathroom. Using templates for various kind of information makes it so you're only typing in information, no formating. Also don't forget to calculate in all the work of having to actually store, organize, and carry around all that paper. Suddenly the digital version doesn't sound like more work anymore.

i also find that spatial layout and a fixed sequence can help with recall. flash cards are supposed to improve on that, but for me, personally, the spatial component is helpful- especially when related concepts are near each other.

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