I saw a pointer to this New York Emacs Meetup talk from 2016. It’s about how Josh Moller-Mara uses org-drill and org-capture together to learn Chinese. Most of us don’t need to learn Chinese, of course, but we all do have things we need to learn and org-drill’s implementation of spaced repetition is an excellent way to do it.
The most interesting part of the talk to me was how Moller-Mara uses org-capture to easily build the flash cards. These are more complicated than usual because Moller-Mara includes additional information such as a code that describes what the Chinese character looks like. What’s nice is that the process is almost entirely automated. When Moller-Mara comes across a new character, he cuts and pastes it into an Org-capture template and the template looks up all the information and adds it to the flash card. All this is driven by the text file Chinese/English dictionary CEDICT. When Moller-Mara pastes a Chinese character into the template, the template code simply does a regex search of the CEDICT file to find the definition.
This is a really good example of how flexible org-capture is and how it can do non-trivial processing of its input. That’s because you can put calls to arbitrary Elisp in the template definition. It would be easy to adopt Moller-Mara’s ideas to other, similar applications.
The slide deck for the talk is here. At the end, are links to his templates and software. The talk itself is just a bit over 36 minutes so plan accordingly.