Short, practical writing on how to actually learn something and keep it. No sign-in, no email, nothing to buy.
Machi.study is a flashcard app, but the app is the easy half. Knowing what to put on a card and when to sit down with it is the half that decides whether any of it works. These are the things we’d tell a friend.
Six rules, each with the before and after. One card one fact, write the question you’ll be asked, and cut the answer down to the shortest thing that would be marked right. This is the one to read first — no schedule can rescue a badly written card.
A week-by-week plan for the three weeks before a test, and a separate plan for when you’ve got three days. Includes the list of things that feel like studying and aren’t.
Why the night before leaves you confident and empty a fortnight later, why you can’t tell the difference from the inside, and the best possible version of a single evening if that’s genuinely all you have.
The one habit underneath every method on this page. What counts as recall and what only feels like it, how to do it in ten minutes with a blank page, and why the four seconds of nothing before the answer arrives are the part that works.
Which lines on a page are worth a card and which are not, how to split a line with two facts in it, what to do with a list, a formula and a date, and how to catch the three bad cards that will waste a week of your reviews.
The graded papers at the bottom of your bag are the best study material you own. Sort the wrong answers into the four kinds of wrong, because each kind needs a different fix, and turn the lot into ten cards you will see again before the final.
What a chatbot is genuinely good at while you study, what it quietly costs you, the difference between asking it to do the work and asking it to make you do the work, and what to do when it is confidently wrong about your subject.
Most of a math test is not a flashcard, and studying it like one is why it goes badly. How to build a problem set from your own homework, how to drill the step you actually get wrong, and the small part that really is a flashcard.
Both directions, and why the harder one is the one that counts. Gender and articles, verbs and their forms, false friends, what a language with its own script honestly costs, and how many words a night is realistic before a Friday quiz.
Not a guide exactly, but the reasoning behind the app: what spaced repetition is, what the five study modes are for, and what this kind of studying is honestly not good at.
Who builds this, why it started, what it costs and who pays for it.