Turn Any Article, Book, or Note Into Flashcards

Ask anyone who has studied seriously and they'll tell you flashcards work. Ask the same person how many they made last month and the answer is usually zero.

The gap isn't belief. It's friction. Writing a good flashcard means rereading the passage, deciding what the question is, phrasing it so it has exactly one answer, and typing both sides. Ninety seconds per card. Do that twenty times and you've spent half an hour typing instead of learning.

So people highlight instead. Highlighting feels like progress and produces nothing.

The shortcut

In pimReader, select a passage and ask the assistant to make flashcards from it.

It proposes a set. You see them in a preview, with the answers hidden so you can test yourself immediately. Keep the good ones, discard the rest, and they're filed into a folder.

Time per card: a few seconds. That change in cost changes behaviour completely.

What it can turn into cards

A passage of prose. Ask for cards and you'll get question-and-answer pairs covering the claims in it.

A word list. Vocabulary becomes word flashcards, with the right language attached, which means they slot into the language review queue rather than sitting in a generic pile.

A table. Tables are dense with exactly the facts worth memorising — dates, doses, parameters. Handing over a table and getting a card per row is one of the highest-value things you can do with this.

A note you wrote yourself. Your own summary of a chapter, turned into questions about itself.

A lesson. If you're working through a study, each lesson can generate its own flashcards, filed into that lesson's folder.

Selected text from another app. Share text into pimReader from wherever you're reading, and it can go through the same pipeline.

Cards you keep, cards you throw away

The preview step is not a formality. Automatic generation produces some genuinely good cards and some bad ones, and the bad ones are worse than nothing — they'll come back to haunt you every few days for a year.

Throw away anything that:

• has more than one plausible answer — "What did the author say about trade?" could be answered five ways
• is answerable from the phrasing alone — if the question contains the answer, you're testing reading, not memory
• you don't actually care about — being able to generate a card is not a reason to keep it
• bundles several facts — split it or drop it

Keep anything that has one clean answer you'd be pleased to know cold in six months.

A reasonable ratio is keeping half. If you're keeping everything, you're not reading them closely enough.

A card is a note

A flashcard in pimReader is a note with a question attached. That's a small design decision with a useful consequence: the card and the source material are the same object.

Tap through from a card to the passage it came from. Add a comment to a card without breaking it. Reorganise cards into folders alongside your other notes. The card is not stranded in a separate flashcard app with no memory of where it came from.

It also means the reverse move works: any note you've already saved can become a flashcard later, when you decide it's worth memorising. You don't have to know at capture time.

Then the scheduler takes over

Once cards exist, FSRS handles when you see them. Rate Again / Hard / Good / Easy, each button showing the interval it will set — for a new card, something like 5 Min, 1 D, 2 D, 4 D.

Answers can be revealed on touch, so you can genuinely test yourself rather than glancing at both sides at once. Cards with a question show the question first, the way they should.

A realistic workflow

Read a long article. At the end, select the two or three paragraphs that carried the actual argument and ask for cards. Keep four.

Do that with everything worth reading and you accumulate maybe fifteen cards a week — around a minute a day of review — that represent the actual content of everything you read this year.

Compare that to the alternative, which is a folder of highlights you will never open again.

The tooling isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is that when making a card costs seconds instead of minutes, you start doing it — and doing it is the whole method.