Automatic Anki question and card creation

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I'm really interested in some sort of program that allows me to highlight quotations from books and automatically formulates flashcards, questions, etc.

The time-consuming process of creating Anki flashcards makes it basically not worth if you're trying to remember massive amounts of information and if there aren't pre-made flashcards. Anki's great for university but I'm aiming to remember large amounts of academic information outside of my basic university course.

Web scraping scripts are great for getting basic, well-presented information (I, for example, created 7,000 Anki flashcards of French verb conjugation using a script which worked magnificently), but I'm basically looking for a fast way to put information in, have it sort statistics and basic phrases from the text and formulate questions. This is a pretty complex task I assume -- but I wonder whether some higher-level information learning platform like Wolfram-Alpha might work for programming such a thing?

I don't really know -- I'm not a coder. Just someone looking to learn massive amounts of information and automate the process.

Any solutions, recommendations, etc?

Thanks

anki
1 Answers

A few words about creating content in Anki

You have to consider that creating notes with Anki is a skill, and as all skills, the more you do it, the better you become at it.

For this reason, a workflow that works well when you are trying to learn a lot of things that you can't simply scrape from somewhere is to add them by hand, and when you realize you're doing a repetitive task, create a script to automate it.

This is easier and more efficient than a general-purpose solution to automatically generate cards because such a solution does not exists: it's easy to write a script that targets a single repetitive process (even if it's only for a few hundred notes), and make one each time you feel you are doing a tedious, repetitive work, but it's very hard to make a full-featured script that works for everything.

Even if you don't know how to code, you can still go on the Anki forum and ask for help: people will happily do so. However, it would be easier if you learnt how to code. For instance, you could learn the basics of Python, which is a very easy-to-learn programming language, which is also very handy for automation scripts and which is used to write Anki add-ons.

Wolfram

Regarding Wolfram-Alpha: I am not an expert about it, but it's just a computer algebra program. Yes, it has been "pimped" with some (quite limited) natural language recognition, and its database also includes non-math content, but it's still just a symbolic computation program. It's not what you are looking for.

Incremental reading

However, I have the impression that what you are looking for is a way to process a lot of text, extract information out of it and create notes that make you learn it. This process is called incremental reading, and here is an article that explains what it is in details. There is an Anki add-on that will help you with that task in Anki. It's clearly not fully automated, far from it, but you can really process several thousands of articles with it.

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