How to make flashcards from lecture notes without rewriting the lecture
Typing the lecture into a deck is the slow way, and it is not what teaches you the material. Deciding which lines deserve a card is. Here is a pass you can run in the ten minutes after a lecture.
Read the slides once for shape, mark the lines that carry a fact you could be asked for, generate a draft set from the file, then delete half of it and rewrite the rest in your own words. The deleting is the study. A deck you never trimmed is a transcript with question marks on it.
Why rewriting the lecture feels productive and is not
Copying a lecture into card format is transcription. The words pass through your hands without ever being retrieved from memory, which is the one operation that builds recall. You finish with 180 cards, no idea which 30 matter, and a strong feeling of having worked hard.
There is also a hard cost: a deck that big cannot be revised. If a review pass takes an hour and you do it twice before the exam, you have bought two passes over material you mostly will not be asked about.
The test: does this sentence deserve a card?
Go down the notes and ask one question of each line: could an exam ask me for this in ten words? If yes, it is a card. If no, it is context, and it belongs on a mind map or nowhere.
- Definition, formula, threshold, date, name, order. Card.
- "This chapter introduces the idea of…" Not a card. Shape, not content.
- A worked example. The method is a card; the numbers are practice.
- Anything your lecturer said twice. Card, and note that they said it twice.
Most lecture hours carry somewhere around 20 to 40 card-worthy facts. If your draft comes back with 150, the extractor has been thorough with the slides, not with the exam — trim it rather than trusting it.
The four passes
- Shape. Skim the slides for the two or three things the hour was actually about. Write those at the top of the page. Everything else hangs off them.
- Mark. Go through and put a dot against every sentence that passes the ten-word test. Do not write a card yet — you are deciding, not writing.
- Draft. Put the file through a converter to get a first set. You are buying the typing, not the judgement.
- Cut and reword. Delete everything that failed the test, then rewrite the survivors so the front asks a question you can actually be asked. This pass is where the learning happens, so do it yourself.
Pass four is short. Twenty minutes of cutting and rewording turns 150 cards into 35 you will still remember in three weeks.
The same fact, two cards
The difference is usually whether the back tells you something you had to produce, or something you only had to recognise:
The first card can be answered by nodding. The second cannot, and it is the shape the exam asks in.
Three failures that show up in every deck
- One card, three facts. If the back has "and" between two facts, they are two cards. Otherwise failing one part fails the whole card and you never see which.
- The card that answers itself. Putting the definition's first words in the prompt so it reads as a sentence. Rewrite it as a question.
- No context on the back. A bare answer tells you nothing when it is the second meaning of a word your course uses specially. Add one clause of anchor.
What it costs on Lookfornotes
A new account gets 30 points, no card required. Uploading a PDF, Word file or pasted notes to get a draft flashcard set costs 5 points, and pulling a summary out of the same document costs 2. So a full lecture — summary and cards — is 7 points, and the free allowance covers about four lectures before you decide whether to buy a pack. Packs are one-off (HK$38 / HK$88 / HK$198) and do not renew, which matters in an exam month and not at all in the holidays.
If you would rather start from the document than from the notes, the workflow is the same in a different order — see PDF to flashcards.
Try it on one of your own lectures
Upload the slides, get a draft set, then time yourself cutting it down. Free check tool needs no account; a full set costs 5 points.
FAQ
Should the cards be typed by me or generated?
Generated for the first draft, typed by you for anything you keep. The typing is cheap; deciding what to keep is the part that takes practice, and it is the part you should not hand over.
How many cards should one lecture produce?
Usually somewhere between 20 and 40 facts. If you are well past that, you are carding the slides rather than the syllabus. Cut first, then add back only what you find yourself forgetting twice.
Do flashcards work for subjects that are mostly calculation?
Partly. The method, the formula and the conditions under which it applies are all card material; the arithmetic needs practice sets. Card the method, then do the sums on paper.
Can I use my Chinese lecture notes?
Yes. Chinese and mixed Chinese-English documents are a case the extraction handles, including notation-heavy HK textbooks and past papers.
Do I need an account to try it?
The free check tool on the homepage runs without one. Generating flashcards from your own file uses points, and a new account starts with 30.