How to learn mathematics: the asterisk method
I did this during university, but made it much more efficient. I wrote a program that would work like this:<p>- while reading, instead of copying, the software would ask me to enter "facts" in form of questions with the most important piece of knowledge being the answer. I would type the question and the answer into the software - much faster than writing anyway<p>- after I have gone through all the material, I would start the Q&A part of the software, which would ask me all the questions in either random order or sequentially (it was an option).<p>- at first, it would only show the question and wait for a key press to show the answer. After the answer was shown, I could mark whether I knew the answer or not. If not, it would mark that question to be asked in the next loop. This is basically the same as the asterisk method.<p>- once I got through all the questions, it would go into next pass, asking only those questions that I didn't know the answer to. And then filter out the remaining ones, and loop again and again until the all answers are known.<p>- then I would restart the whole system with all the questions to check.<p>What I learned after using this for about 2 years, is that there's a short term memory problem. Often I would know some of the answers on the first pass, but a week later I might forget it.<p>I found a way that works much better: Even if you mark that you know the answer, it will come up once again in the next pass. If you mark that you know it twice in a row, only then it would be removed. For some reason, this made the knowledge stick much better.