I just used Anki to help me do extremely well in my Microbiology exam. I'm also using it to study my other remaining University modules.

With Microbiology I first went through the syllabus, wrote a revision guide in Lyx, then picked out all the facts from the guide and entered them in question form into Anki, trying to model them on past-exam papers which we were given. It worked perfectly, with 100% retention by the time of my exam. I expect close to 100% when I get my results. I also shared the files with the rest of the class and from the feedback I received it helped everyone alot.

With the other modules, I have so far entered all the pat exam questions to anki files, and for example with chemistry I'm ankifying all the ion charges and other chemical data which is useful to know. I will later make guides and then anki decks based on the syllabi for these too.

My experience is that Anki works extremely well for any information, as long as you can adapt the information to a question and answer format.

I use it for like.... everything that I want to remember.

Used it for my school final exams, though I was a bit late in realizing that this works as well, so I had to cram in stuff from 3 years in 1~2 months time. Had to leave out lots of facts, so I don't expect it to be much better than when I hadn't used it. ^^;
But a big plus was that this method didn't stress me out as nearly as much as my classmates, because I could be sure that I would know what I've entered there by the time of the exam.

My approach wasn't the exam question one, I rather tried sentence mining, lol. Example: Read through the biology book, and when I stumbled upon some unknown fact/definition/word or something I'd enter it into Anki. Sometimes leaving out the word in question, to lay the focus on remembering that specific word.
It worked of course, but now I actually kind of regret that I didn't try out the exam question method. Seems to be so much faster and more efficient. Will surely use that in university!

---

another thing:

I'm currently testing out how to use Anki for studying art, painting to be exact. Not art history or something but actually painting, human anatomy, color/light relations and so on.  Anyone ever tried that?

I use Anki extensively for mathematics. Beyond the obvious (trigonometric identities, simple integration and differentiation identities, summation identities), I use it to remember terminology and theorems. Some examples:

Algebra:

Front: [latex]A loop $(Q,*)$\\

This algebraic structure is a quasigroup that exhibits what additional property?[/latex]

Back: [latex]An identity element; $\exists e \in Q | \forall x \in Q, x*e = x = e*x$\\

What is the name for a quasigroup that exhibits this property?[/latex]

Set Theory:

Front: [latex]\textit{well-ordered}\\

What does it mean for a relation on a set to possess this property?[/latex]

Back: [latex]A relation $S$ on a set with this property is a total order such that every non-empty subset of $S$ has a least element.\\

What is the term for a relation with this property?[/latex]

Topology:

Front: [latex]$x$ is a limit point for a set $S$.\\

In point-set topology, what does this mean?[/latex]

Back: [latex]$\forall \epsilon > 0, (V_\epsilon(x)\setminus {x}) \cap S \neq \emptyset$\\

In point-set topology, what do we call a point $x$ with this property? [/latex]

Generating Functions:

Front: [latex]$$(1+x)^n$$\\

This is the generating function of what sequence?[/latex]

Back: [latex]$${n \choose 0}+{n \choose 1}x + {n \choose 2}x^2 + \cdots + {n \choose n}x^n$$\\

This sequence is produced by what generating function?[/latex]

You get the idea.

~J

Nomad wrote:

I'm using it for everything I want to remember, from optoelectronics to poker knowledge. Lately I've been reviewing some physics stuff, so I'm inputing a lot of stuff from Neil Ashcroft's "Solid State Physics". Would love to see a proper latex editor to easily work on my equations...

Ah...solid state physics..."We can do everything for the hydrogen atom but what?!  You want to figure out the same stuff for helium?!  You have no idea how much pain that extra electron causes us without our computers using approximations that make the electron disappear mathematically"

been trying to convince my workmates daughter (not like that...)  to use anki to help with her driving test theory questions. seeing as she keeps failing.  i recomended she put the questions in and let it give her questions a day.

convincing people who have never used an srs to use one. or telling them the benifits is met with much confusion and scepticism.  i explain.. well ive "learnt" over 1900 japanese characters with it.. so a few Q&As surely will be easier.  but they look at me with a mild distain. and then carry on there methods and fail ..  sigh

sometimes something is so obvious and works so well, people assume theres a catch and avoid it.

theasianpleaser wrote:

Ah...solid state physics..."We can do everything for the hydrogen atom but what?!  You want to figure out the same stuff for helium?!  You have no idea how much pain that extra electron causes us without our computers using approximations that make the electron disappear mathematically"

Haha!! I see you're familiar with my pains!

yukamina wrote:

saru_yo wrote:

I'm currently testing out how to use Anki for studying art, painting to be exact. Not art history or something but actually painting, human anatomy, color/light relations and so on.  Anyone ever tried that?

How do you go about that?

I've tried several approaches by now.
For Anatomy, I'm using "The Human Figure" by Vanderpoel as a basis. It's pretty thin but contains like ( nearly ) everything you need to know about anatomy, written in a style so that every sentence is basically n + 1. -> Perfect for studying!
So I've always added a sentence ( / a new fact, sometimes it's two sentences but most of the time one. ) plus a picture that shows exactly the part of the body from that view in that action that is described there. I have everything in the question field here, nothing in the answer field. So my task when I see this card is basically the same like when I'm studying Japanese sentences: Read the sentences, look at the picture, then pass/fail according to whether and how well I understand the fact presented there.

Other than that, I have some cards that basically contain only pictures in the question field, nothing in the answer field again. This ranges from paintings from other artists, sketches that show some body construction model ( Bammes ) to just some random web images I liked for some reason. On top of the pictures I've always written for what reason I've added it. Eg. colors, light/shadow or composition or anything like that. Here as well, I try to work n + 1 somehow. The aim is to build up some kind of visual library that 99% of artists try to build up by copying or "referencing" other existing images.

Well, of course I'm still testing but these two have worked best for me so far

Edit:

ファブリス wrote:

I searched for information on that. I found that there are plenty of "affirmations" flash cards sets, some that you can buy just to flip through during the day I guess. I suppose you wouldn't want to do too many of those, probably above 20 or so you wouldn't pay attention anymore.

now, that's cool! I've not done exactly this, but... when I find some cool quote / motivational sentence in Japanese I'm very often adding because of the meaning, although I already know all vocabulary contained. It's nice when they pop up in the reviews occasionally ^^

Last edited by saru_yo (2009 April 02, 5:45 pm)

Lately, I've been thinking of using Anki for some school subjects (math etc.), but my main problem is that I don't know how to get that LaTeX stuff working in Anki. All I get is this error:

Anki wrote:

Error executing 'latex' or 'dvipng'.
A log file is available here:
c:\docume~1\admini~1\lokale~1\temp\ankieojwn5​

Anyone with more knowledge on this issue? Any help is appreciated.

Seems to be somewhat working now, at least in the card preview feature. It's a different story on the cards however, where it only shows _ on the front, and some weird result on the back. I'm using one of the downloadable math decks at the moment, to get a feel for how it's done.

By the way, any reference to the different functions used?

Edit: Found this line at the bottom of the most recent log thingy:

log thingy wrote:

dvipng warning: font cmsy10 at 960 dpi not found, characters will be left blank

Could this have something to do with the matter?

Last edited by Sleepyhead (2009 April 07, 3:56 pm)

sleepyhead wrote:

Lately, I've been thinking of using Anki for some school subjects (math etc.), but my main problem is that I don't know how to get that LaTeX stuff working in Anki. All I get is this error:

ADMIN: This isn't a support forum for Anki. Please post technical questions about Anki on the Anki discussion group, thank you.

http://groups.google.com/group/ankisrs/topics

Yep, I use it for Business Studies, Chemistry and Math. I don't know how to use latex so I just draw whatever I want in the SRS, scan it and put it in the question >_>

Here's the mini-app I made for brainw.. I mean, for repeating affirmations



The flashcard review uses the same base component as that of the refactored RevTK site. I don't know if it helps remembering teh kanji, I haven't repeated it enough yet !