How can you read a whole textbook in one month?

[MFateh2000]

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I have read some threads on this forum and some students have written that they have read big Robbins in one month. How is this possible? How can one read around 40 pages in a single day while still being able to recall the information or even understand them to an enough extent? Any tips?

 

[Rapsidy]

Nobody reads entire books, there’s no time for that. You may read some portions in chapters or external articles your school may link, but you would be wasting your time reading entire books chapter by chapter unless you have a perfect memory and only learn by reading.

 

[voxveritatisetlucis]

Quizlet allows autocomplete. Since the books are so popular, there are already cards for text from the book

 

[TakotsuboOkazaki]

Pro-Tip: They almost certainly don't.

Even if you got through 40 pages qd and understood them all, the retention % would be abysmal on a single pass of passive reading.

 

[Dral]

Textbooks for me are to get big picture ideas/understanding how the material all fits together, to try to remember specifics as much as possible, or to at least remember where they were in the book so I could get back to them when I needed to access them again. Don't need that last part as much now thanks to google/wiki.

Learning solely from a textbook sounds horrible.

 

[Stagg737]

Those students are full of crap or the extremely rare (like unicorn rare) individual with an eidetic memory. You can skim it or use it as a reference if you're using another source like Anki or quizlet, but actually reading it alone in one month for retention is not realistic for 99.99% of individuals. It can be possible to do this with smaller texts or references like Little Robbins, but not with comprehensive textbooks like Robbins or Harrison's.

For reference, my only textbooks for M2 year was big Robbins, a micro textbook, and a pharm textbook. 75% of our material came from Robbins, and it was an accomplishment if you made more than 3 passes on the covered material in 2-3 weeks, which was usually ~200 pages.

 

[MFateh2000]

What do you suggest then? I find making flashcards extremely laborious and it takes me like 2 days to make flashcards of a chapter I have already studied. What would you suggest I do instead? Is it better to make flashcards while studying the chapter or should I just skim through the chapter in a couple of hours then reread it again while making flashcards?

 

[Dral]

First suggestion is to capitalize off of the work of others. Find flashcards that someone else has already made.

One would think that making flashcards is active learning. I guess it could be for some. It wasn't that way for me.

 

[Lawpy]

What do you suggest then? I find making flashcards extremely laborious and it takes me like 2 days to make flashcards of a chapter I have already studied. What would you suggest I do instead? Is it better to make flashcards while studying the chapter or should I just skim through the chapter in a couple of hours then reread it again while making flashcards?

Have you tried the premade decks like AnKing?

 

[Lawpy]

First suggestion is to capitalize off of the work of others. Find flashcards that someone else has already made.

One would think that making flashcards is active learning. I guess it could be for some. It wasn't that way for me.

Yeah personally i learn best by doing a lot of practice questions

 

[MFateh2000]

I have used zanki decks before and they were great. But I think robbins goes into much more details some of which are important imo. Would you suggest using zanki as a primary deck then add additional flashcards on top of it?

 

[Lawpy]

I have used zanki decks before and they were great. But I think robbins goes into much more details some of which are important imo. Would you suggest using zanki as a primary deck then add additional flashcards on top of it?

Yep

 

[MFateh2000]

Thanks for all of your feedback 🙏

 

[wholeheartedly]

@NickNaylor were you one of the folks who read all of Big Robbins or am I thinking of someone else?


If so, what approach did you take (read for basics or deep understanding) and how long did it take you?