From paper to digital: how I transformed my old French notes

I have kept these for years with the faith that one day I would find a way to preserve them. They are old and fragile, and I was growing tired of fighting for their survival. So, when we created our Paperless X minimalist digital notebooks, I could finally rewrite my French high school notes!

I prefer all my notes handwritten for several reasons. My old French notes have a contents page that’s now difficult to see. The ink is all faded; just another reason to start taking digital notes (durability). Ink fades, paper is too fragile (it tears), or it gets lost. Am I the only one who finds my notes indestructible, with vector ink that doesn’t fade and multiple backups in the cloud?

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Contents page

The contents page in my digital notes has several colours representing different topics. I grouped related topics to avoid using multiple notebooks. Most topic notes were too short to fill a page. This digital notebook has 21 topic pages, but I managed to fit in a lot more topics than that.

Scans

My paper notes have several handouts that I scanned into Notability. I saved most of them as images (on topic pages). That way, I could still navigate to the contents page. I also saved a few scans as PDFs. I might redo some of them if I ever find the energy. The ink on them is a bit faded, so I would like to redo them. But, for now, they are preserved, and I am happy with that.

Ink colours

Black was my primary ink colour for these notes. It is my go-to colour for most notes. I also used blue for notes I need to pay a bit more attention to. For all my French sentences, I used pink. It’s bright and easy to tell apart from all the other ink surrounding it, which highlights the notes. Red works as well, but I prefer not to use it.

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Non-topic pages

Most of the topics took up a page, so they didn’t use a lot of the non-topic pages. I had to move those to the end of the notebook. It was a painful task because I did these before Notability supported multiple page selection. I am happy we finally have that feature in the app.

Apps I used

As you can tell, Notability still remains my go-to note-taking app for final study notes. Noteful is now my go-to note-taking app. It gives me the best handwriting experience, especially for notes I intend to sell. When zoomed in, the ink often gets wobbly; this bug has plagued the app for a while now. Let’s hope our developers can fix that for us. It’s very annoying, especially when you have lots of notes.

The biggest part of learning a new language, much bigger than grammar notes, is vocabulary. In my old paper notes, I simply divided my page into two and wrote my French words in one column and English ones in the other. To immortalise my vocabulary, I used Kyoku Flashcards. It is very simple to use, which is perfect for my needs.

In the app, I have a French folder with groups of vocabulary. The biggest group has 36 words. I kept them small to make them easier to learn and to guarantee I finish all the words in a session once I start.

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I am writing these in pencil. The pencil tool is always my favourite tool in note-taking apps, but it never made sense to write notes in pencil before. But these flashcards are just simple words, and my brain somehow accepted that I can write them in pencil. So I did. My French notes are available for purchase in our store.

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