Anki-fy your life

The iOS app is a one-time payment though.

This article is definitely not written with an unfamiliar reader in mind though, that's for sure.

Here's what I'd like: while I'm reading a (PDF) book, I want to highlight some text (and maybe manually tweak it a little) and have it converted into some "Anki card" format so when I want to review the contents of the book later, I can use Anki for it.

Any ideas?

Several excellent physics and math students I worked with have never used spaced repetition software, but were excellent at their studies because they consistently solved textbook problems. For them, they got the "repetitions" (aka exposure to facts and problems) via solving more new problems from the book nearly every day. Later problems in the textbooks would provide review of previous problems. This method can be far more effective than spending too much studying with spaced repetition software (which I have done in the past), as the time spent creating new cards and reviewing cards that are due comes at the expense of time spent solving new problems.

Ideally, you can perhaps find time for both activities. But in my personal experience, I learned mathematics more effectively by focusing primarily on textbook problems (reviewing older material through new problems) and spending a very limited amount of time with spaced repetition, versus even a fifty-fifty split between a textbook and spaced repetition that I've experimented with in the past.

In the past, I also spent too much time in the past remembering phrases and vocabulary when learning new languages, and not enough time practicing listening, writing, and especially conversation. Certain skills can only be efficiently developed by directly practicing them. While spaced repetition software remains an essential part to my language studies, it is very far from sufficient (even just a couple hours of conversation practice per week over three months, got me much further than primarily focusing on Anki/spaced repetition for six months).

Spaced repetition systems like Anki (though I moved to SuperMemo about a year back) are vital to my daily studies, but I've learned far more effectively by treating these systems as a supplement to more traditional and tested study methods that rely on active problem-solving. For technical fields, these are textbook problems from books by well-regarded authors, and for languages, these are conversation practice and writing articles that I request feedback on (in particular, teachers in small group classes have given me great, useful feedback on my writing).