One of the new apps that I’ve added to my morning routine is a very simple one called “LineByLine” (I say “app”, but I think it’s just that website – no mobile app).
While Anki is fantastic for learning atomic pieces of data (countries, names, facts, etc), it’s not great for memorizing long pieces of text, and that’s where LineByLine comes in. If you want to remember a short speech, a poem, or some other bit of text, LineByLine helps walk you through it.
Suppose, for example, that you wanted to memorize the US Pledge of Allegiance. We’d start by pasting it in, paying careful attention to line breaks, as those are treated as separate chunks of text. I’d do it something like this:
Now, when I go to review it, it’ll start by just showing me what’s there with just a few letters missing, like this:
Over time, it removes more and more from each section:
Eventually, it just walks you through with blank lines. If you make any mistakes, just let it know and it’ll help you work on that section.
Use cases
To be fair, I’m not using it for very much yet. So far I’m learning the Preamble of the Constitution (“We the People of the United States…“), the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…“) and George’s great story from Seinfeld (“The sea was angry that day, my friends…“). The last one is silly, but why not?
The app is free to use, but only remembers you on a single machine. If you want to sync across computers, it’s a grand total of $5, one-time, and you’re good for life. Quite a deal!
If you have something that you need to memorize, check out LineByLine.
What will you put in there to start to memorize?
