If you took my advice and checked out Ali Abdaal’s videos on evidence-based study techniques, you know that one of the two guiding principles of effective learning is spaced repetition. An easy way to do that is to start with flashcards and use some sort of record keeping to track which questions you need to revisit. There are, of course, some tools available to automate this. One such tool is Anki. You can enter flashcards with a question on the front and an answer on the back and Anki will track your progress and help you review the questions you get wrong more often then the ones you get right.
On the other hand, who wants to deal with inputting questions and answers into some suboptimal, bespoke editor? Fortunately, you can get all the benefits of Anki and still do your editing in Emacs. Cheong Yiufung has an informative post that explains how to write your flashcards in Emacs and Org-mode and export them to Anki. The post has several videos—sadly without useful audio—that demonstrate the app in action.
The nice thing about Anki is that it’s functionally like a physical set of flashcards in that you can sync your deck across all your devices and take it with you on your phone or tablet. That’s perfect for, say, your bus or train ride: you can review your material in those short otherwise lost time spans.
The takeaways from this post are (1) you should be using spaced repetition to help you learn new material and (2) if you want to do spaced repetition with flashcards, Anki and Emacs is a good solution.