Is Anki a good SRS for non-language related studies? What other programs/tools do you recommend (and why)?

I will be studying Acupuncture. There will be quite a bit of Chinese terminology (in pinyin) that I would like to associate characters with (and perhaps learn the Japanese readings for as well), but the majority of it will be non-language related study.

Have other people here used Anki or another SRS to memorize things other than characters and foreign language (Japanese/Chinese/etc)?

How well has Anki or another SRS program worked for you?

I'm not very fast at typing. (Sigh.) And so far my OCR software hasn't performed that well with text that I've scanned. Maybe I need a better scanner. Any recommendations on a good scanner for text?

I've heard folks on other threads mention scanning texts into image files to use with their SRS. Is this easy to utilize in Anki? What image format is best?
(Sadly I'm not very tech savvy either.)

What other methods do you use to get data into your SRS?

Any and all help and suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I can't speak from personal experience, but I know that SuperMemo (and therefore Mnemosyne, Anki, etc., which were based on it) operates on general principles of memory. It doesn't really have anything specific to do with language. In fact, many of the examples that SuperMemo uses on its website are not for learning language. (I think they've realized their product has a reputation for being for language learning and they're making a deliberate effort to shed that image.) So Anki should work perfectly fine for memorizing other things.

- Kef

Thanks, Kef.

I'm glad to hear that Anki should work fine for non-language learning. (I've read that super-memo can be a bear to learn how to use.)

I want to scan text images to use with Anki. (My OCR is useless.)

Can anyone recommend an image format for scanning text -- for use in Anki (or another SRS)?

Thanks in advance.

For what it's worth, the few hours I've put into trying to use Mnemosyne for mathematics work suggest that it may be worthless for this purpose. Compounding the atrocious UI is the horrible LaTeX support (I could rant on this at length); I suspect getting it working properly would be more trouble than it's worth.

Disappointing, really. Other disciplines may vary.

~J

Yes, I too have found that it's probably not worth the time to SRS mathematical topics. It takes long to input them and it takes long to do the reps. I think an SRS should only be made of short and straightforward questions-answers.

woodwojr: What problems did you have with the LaTeX support?

Eh, there's plenty of material that can be reviewed in a fast, straightforward manner--even just learning the more commonly used identities, definitions, and mathematical symbols can be worthwhile. The entry, though, is painful.

Edit: regarding LaTeX support, every card needs a big honking <latex></latex> opening/closing pair to make the whole card be in LaTeX, there's no way I've found to set a card template without editing the program source so you have to enter that on every single card (woe betide you if you actually want to copy/paste information other than the tags), and if you relent and try to just use the math environment, you're still having to type seven extra characters every time you want to use it (<$></$>).

There are other issues regarding the (as far as I can tell) nigh-impossibility of making the program work with XeLaTeX short of substantial modifications to the source, but the above parts are the real dealbreakers IMO.

~J

Sounds like most of those things would be simpler in Anki. :-)

I fail to see how changing angle braces to square braces makes anything simpler; am I missing something?

~J

You can insert the brackets with a single shortcut key. Both Mnemosyne and Anki support custom preamble, so getting XeLateX probably wouldn't be hard either.

I've heavily customized the preamble already (well, more like copied most of my standard preamble from the templates I use for general-purpose work). The problem with Mnemosyne's use of XeLaTeX is that Mnemosyne relies on the output of a PNG, while I haven't been able to find a PNG converter for XeLaTeX's XDV output, and dvipng expects, well, DVI files.

I don't know how Anki does its display; once I get over losing most of yesterday to Mnemosyne I might try to force it to do what I want. The shortcut key, while no kind of solution, is certainly a good workaround to know about; much appreciated.

~J

You can use a program like imagemagick to convert from a pdf to a png. The dvipng command line is customizable and you don't have to actually use dvipng at all.