This Amazing Tool Allows You to Learn Anything in 5 Minutes and Remember It Forever

Do you know that the expected review time to remember something forever is less than five minutes? Isn't it amazing?

Research has long shown that spaced repetition is essential for us to absorb information better.

However, we have so many things coming up in our daily life. It is difficult to schedule review time and review contents for various materials we learned in different classes. How do we know if we are doing it in the most effective way? If so, what is the best solution to this problem?

Flashcards are a fantastic way to break your revision of content heavy subjects up into bite sized chunks and to test yourself on your knowledge. Somewhere buried deep under a bunch of notebooks that fill my containers I still have the flashcard sets I made for drilling Chinese poetries in elementary school. Years after, the knowledge those words represent is still fresh in my mind. Does it mean that I have better memory when I was a kid? Maybe. But I believe it's mostly because my Chinese teacher forced us to review them regularly and consistently.

Nowadays, I don't think many people will be patient enough to design flashcards from index cards. It is not only time-consuming but also unrealistic. Our memorized knowledge banks have been expanded significantly since elementary school. Besides, it is just too demanding for human beings to calculate when will be the best time to review a certain material according to how strong our memories are. That's why I've found a solution that goes beyond index cards, and can even help me become more productive.

The popular Quizlet has both mobile and online versions. The web-based application can facilitate the flashcard making process while a mobile device that’s already flashcard sized can let you practice on the go. If you feel it's too troublesome to make flashcards on your own, it also provides a wide range of user-generated flashcards for you to choose from. It is ideal for preparing for course quiz or other important tests.

I know some students might want to crowdsource study sets so that each student only needs to do a portion of the work. The review sheet can be extremely long but the collaboration feature allows you to save time in a pinch. Of course, others can also enjoy the process of making sets on their own as part of their learning process — it all depends on your own study style!

For those international students who are studying abroad, Quizlet is just the go-to place for vocabulary learning. It‘s common for non-native speakers to encounter some unfamiliar words or phrases now and then. Looking up all the vocabularies in the dictionaries might have a bad influence on the understanding of the entire article.

One way to avoid this interruption is to write down all the unfamiliar words on a blank paper and revisit them when you finish the reading. After that, you can simply create new study set or reuse an old one and type the unfamiliar words in a row. When it comes to filling the definitions for each vocabulary, you only need to copy and paste them from a trustworthy digital dictionary. This is how I created my own customized study sets for language learning and course reviews.

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Weekly Challenge

1. Find an existing study set of a language you don't know

2. Start the weekly challenge by remembering all the vocabularies

3. Share your test results below