Why textbooks don't stick
Reading a chapter feels like studying, but it's almost entirely passive — your eyes move, your memory doesn't. Dense documents make it worse: there's so much text that highlighting becomes a substitute for thinking, and you finish with a colorful page and little recall.
The fix is the same as for any material: pull the key facts out, phrase them as questions, and review them on a spaced schedule.
The manual way
Effective, just slow:
- Read a section, then close it and note the 3–5 things you'd be tested on.
- Turn each into a one-fact question — don't copy sentences verbatim.
- Pull definitions, formulas, and labeled diagrams straight into cards.
- Load them into a spaced-repetition app and review daily.
The fast way (AI)
For a 40-page chapter, doing that by hand is a chore. FlazhAI reads the document — PDF, DOCX, slides, even scanned/image PDFs via vision OCR — extracts the key points, and drafts a spaced-repetition deck you preview and edit before saving.
Because the deck is built from the source, you can also jump back to the exact passage a card came from, generate a chapter deep-dive, or ask questions about the document in chat.
What makes a good textbook card
The usual rules, with a textbook twist:
- Split anything with sub-parts into separate cards — chapters love to bundle.
- Turn labeled figures into image or cloze cards.
- Capture the why behind a formula, not just the formula.
- Skip filler — chapter intros and summaries rarely need their own cards.