[phobosanomaly]

I've tried breaking textbooks down into Anki cards, and it takes forever and afterwards I'm left feeling underwhelmed. But, if you're going to do it, I've found that my favorite method of review is TTS on the Anki app with swipe gestures, and I just go for loooong walks while grinding my flash cards, just holding the phone at my side and swiping with my thumb '1' or '3'.

One thing I tried that I liked was reading the entire textbook out-loud into a set of bluetooth headphones chapter-by-chapter. I then process the raw audio file using Audacity's 'truncate silence' tool, as well as increasing the tempo of the audio file by 1.5-2x speed. I read it mechanically, straight-through as quickly as I possibly can on the first run. Then I make 1-2 passes back through the entire book using the audio file of my own recorded voice sped up in order to pace myself.

That way I go through the entire book like 3 times. Once slow, twice fast. I might do my second or third pass months or years later. Doing it mechanically means that I can grind through nonfiction technical books that are hundreds of pages long pretty quickly, and I know exactly how long my reviews will take, since it's the length of my audio file. The largest book I've pulled it off with was 900 pages. It was a sufferfest, but if you smoke a little pot while you're doing it, you can get into a nice rhythm and it's kind of fun.

I don't remember every single detail of the book using this method, but I've found cranking through them relentlessly with some time in-between to be very, very effective from a practical perspective. It scratches the 'done is better than perfect' itch, and when I need a specific detail I know exactly where to look.