Flashcard overhaul wishlist

[etm001]

Hi,

I know flashcards are the next feature due for a major overhaul. Just a few things I'd like to see:

• Provide more horizontal screen real estate when reviewing/testing, as the correct/incorrect etc. buttons take up valuable screen real estate. This is an issue when I'm writing a long answer on the screen (before revealing the card).
• Update existing user-defined cards' definitions via import: ability to update existing user-defined cards' definitions via file import. (I don't think this is possible now?). A few examples where this would have come in handy for me:
  • Textbook definition didn't have measure words for objects, went back and added them to the cards' definitions. Updated dozens of cards.
  • I wanted to supplement cards' definitions with one or more example sentences that weren't originally included as part of the definition entry (see note below for details).

In an ideal world I'd have everything perfectly entered before importing and testing on the cards (and thus accumulating card scores), but it just doesn't always happen that way.

Note: actually for now I don't bother entering example sentences from my textbooks that accompany definitions, as I want to have each example sentence on a separate line (just like a nicely formatted dictionary entry). I know this might be supported by XML imports (which don't seem to be well documented?) or even that ancient, not recommended internal character code (mentioned somewhere in an old post), but long story short, right now figuring out how to make this happen with the current release doesn't feel worth the time/effort (especially knowing this module is due for major changes). Anything that will make the process for formatting the definitions easier will definitely be appreciated.

 

[mikelove]

Horizontal real estate: do you mean vertical, or is this in landscape orientation? Is it basically just that you want the drawing box to overlap the answer buttons?

Update definitions via import: this is actually coming in 3.0.1 - it's already supported on Android and has been for a while, we forgot to add the extra 'duplicate cards' option to the import screen in 3.0 to hook into it but we've fixed that in 3.0.1.

Formatting text is on our to-do list but like a number of other things is waiting for us to put in the couple of weeks of development time that it would take to get our custom text field control (which we use now to render definitions etc) to support editing so that we're no longer subject to the mercurial whims of Apple's UITextField.

 

[etm001]

Horizontal real estate: do you mean vertical, or is this in landscape orientation? Is it basically just that you want the drawing box to overlap the answer buttons?

This is in landscape orientation. I typically run out of room to write if the answer has 4+ characters (which is not the majority of my cards, admittedly). In landscape orientation, the width of the area allocated to the answer buttons has always felt very, very large to me.

I don't know how much the UI can/will change in the future update. If resource constraints dictate that the UI can't/won't change that much, then my only thought is to make the buttons more compact, or provide an option to display them along the bottom of the screen (in landscape orientation), which would allow writing across the full width of the screen (the vertical dimension of the buttons can't be too tall, else you just end up back at square one again, taking up too much screen real estate).

If the update will allow for a complete overhaul of the UI, then I'm sure there's lot's of great layouts that could improve display and input efficiency.

 

[mikelove]

We're breaking it up into several updates, actually, one of which we plan to make heavily UI-centric. But that'll probably be late in the year since between iOS 8 and the increasing likelihood of a larger-screened iPhone 6 we'd rather not commit to a new design now which we're just going to have to overhaul again in a few months.

 

[mprey]

I would also love the ability to add the example sentences from search queries as flashcards, complete with audio playback and so on. Learning with whole sentences is a really powerful tool and the big amount of example sentences in the dicts would make this really convenient.

 

[mikelove]

Definitely in our plans, yes - lots of interest in sentence-based flashcards.

 

[mprey]

That's great to hear! After playing around more with the flashcards I feel there are 2 features missing that would make Pleco the best flashcard system around specifically for Chinese -

1) The ability to save different test settings as test profiles and
2) The ability to save cards under completely separate decks

Because Pleco has the great flexibility when it comes to testing for pronunciation, tone, character writing, etc., but basically if I test a card for one of them, the score (if I understand it right) of the card gets adjusted irregardless of what I just tested for. So I might know the tone of a word well, but not the characters, but in the current version it seems kind of hard to account for that. The manual mentions that I can make the subject tested for score-based so that it first asks tone, later the character etc., but I don't feel this is flexible enough, especially when trying to handle different test settings. What I ideally would like to do is save a bunch of cards under one deck, assign a test profile to it, and then this whole thing would be completely independent of anything else. I hope that makes sense.

 

[denmitch]

Alternately the scoring system could be based on the test type so that each card had a score for pronunciation, character recognition, accurate tone, etc.

 

[abdrifter]

Definitely in our plans, yes - lots of interest in sentence-based flashcards.

Oh yes, LOTS of interest!!!

 

[mikelove]

mprey - it sounds to me like these actually are both things that we already support. You can create multiple profiles by tapping on the "Manage" button at the top right corner of the "Choose Profile" screen, and for independent decks, you can give each type of test its own 'scorefile' (independent set of scores / review histories / etc) which you create / manage through the "Scorefile" selector at the top of "Scoring."

denmitch - that's what Anki does now, but we think our approach offers more flexibility - you might want to have two different pronunciation profiles, for example, one for a coarse memorization where you only have to recall the syllables and not the tones (a very forgiving options set for 'fill in the blanks') and a stricter one that does require you to remember tones. (pedagogically it's not something we'd really recommend, but if we were sticklers about following our own pedagogical recommendations the flashcard system would have about 90% fewer options than it has now) Bit more work to set up, which is something we intend to improve on, but ultimately it makes the system much more powerful.

 

[Bendy-Ren]

Don't know if this has been said before, but have you thought about auto-categories for flashcards?

Something like "smart playlists" in iTunes, which update automatically based on criteria like score history, etc.

If nothing else: There seem to be two disparate sets of filters depending on if you're searching vs. making a test profile. I'd like the full set of options available in both

 

[mikelove]

The two sets of filters are another Palm legacy thing - see my other reply; certainly something we'd like to rectify, yes.

 

[kun4]

Anki's flashcard algorithm somehow feels smoother, more polished; but Pleco features much better integration with dictionary, reader and ocr. Pleco flash cards with Anki's algorithm would be the best of both worlds.
How about adding a new flash card profile, "Anki", written and maintained by Daniel Elmes?

 

[mikelove]

Anki's flashcard algorithm somehow feels smoother, more polished; but Pleco features much better integration with dictionary, reader and ocr. Pleco flash cards with Anki's algorithm would be the best of both worlds.
How about adding a new flash card profile, "Anki", written and maintained by Daniel Elmes?

Heh, doubt he'd go for that since we're direct competitors on iOS at least.

Anyway the issue (such as it is) isn't a particular set of profile settings but rather the fact that our system is a) old (designed around the hardware limitations of Palm (which was extremely slow at floating-point math, among other things) - Anki's never worked on anything less sophisticated than iOS/Android which basically means an early-00s PC), b) too accommodating of other repetition systems (especially 'weighted') instead of just focusing on SRS, and c) too accommodating of different means of handling interval calculation (like our 'manual' mode) - eliminating those problems will make our system vastly more polished just on that basis, and along with some other modest algorithmic refinements (dynamically adjusting how easiness translates to spacing, more akin to SM-5 than to the SM-2 derivative that Anki uses) and the fact that unlike Anki we get to design around exactly one type of material to study, we think we can end up with something that's worlds ahead of what they have.

It's embarrassing that we don't already have a newer system like that in place, but that's mostly the fault of our users' fickle platform preferences - if we'd ignored Android and gone iOS-only we'd have had 3.0 out in 2011 or 2012 and our flashcard overhaul done long ago too, and if we'd ignored iOS and only supported Windows Mobile our sales would have dwindled to nothing but we'd have probably had a pretty amazing flashcard algorithm by 2010 But since the 2008/9 debut of our current flashcard system, we've spent much more of our time porting than adding new features, and nowhere is the downside of that more apparent than in flashcards.

 

[sobriaebritas]

Hi Mike,

I think this has been pointed out before, but just in case it hasn't. In Settings/Languages+Text/Pronunciation I've the following settings: Mandarin system/Pinyin with Marks, and Hide example pronunciation on. It seems these settings apply only to the dictionary definition screen, and not when taking a flashcard test. So in order not to see the pinyin when taking a test, I change the setting Pinyin with Marks to Skip. But when I do this, start a test session, and tap on the Chinese characters of the examples to see the Popup Definition, there is no pinyin on it. I wish this could be taken into account in the flascards overhaul.

Thank you.

 

[mikelove]

That one's actually just a bug - already fixed for 3.0.1.

 

[sahal]

Not sure whether this is already part of "smoothing" the SRS algorithm, but it would be nice to have the flashcards repeat dates distributed a bit more randomly, e.g. randomly increase or decrease the score by up to ten percent. My previous flashcard did use some random elements, at least for the length of the first repeat interval after learning a new card.

When one learns many cards in a short period of time and does not really bother much about the different degrees of "correct", one ends up with a high number of cards to repeat on certain days, i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 etc days after first learning them. I learnt my whole card deck in about two weeks when I transitioned from my previous flashcard app to pleco, and I still sometimes have days where there are several hundred cards due for repeating.

 

[mikelove]

It actually does randomize the order within a test a bit - you won't get cards in exactly the order due - but we don't randomize days; we're considering that for a future update, but in general my suggestion int his case is that you simply quit when you've studied all of the cards you have time for; when you come back later it'll pick right back up where you left off.

 

[Tommyb]

Hi!

A better flashcard system, and better integration with the reader are updates that (as an advanced learner) I'm really desperate for.

Has anyone tried readlang or nuli!努力！？Although far less smooth than pleco, both of these have brilliant features for facilitating learning vocab in context. Readlang automatically records every word that you check in the dictionary, and generates flashcards to test these word in their original context. You can also add extra sentences and readlang will test you on the word in different contexts. Nuli! takes this last idea further, and chooses a sentence containing the target word from the tatoeba database; having different contexts really keeps tests interesting although there is an issue with sentence quality. Nuli! also shows the status of words (e.g. Unknown, learning, known) when reading texts, also a nice feature. Both of these are basically free.

I would love to see some of these features built into pleco; are there any plans for this? If so, when? If they were included as new features I for one would be a very regular user!

At the moment I try to use pleco reader, then highlight sentences and make them into custom cards for review, but this is very cumbersome and of course lacks the features mentioned above. Consequently I'm trying out various alternatives such as the 2 above.

 

[mikelove]

Contextual sentence integration like this is definitely something we're working on, yes - been a popular feature request for a long time. Likewise for sentence-based flashcards / clozes (not sure if either of those websites features them, but Anki does).

But for simply seeing example sentences for a word, why not just turn on the option to display examples from our dictionaries in your flashcards? If you get sick of always seeing the same ones you can enable the option to allow flipping between dictionaries after a card is revealed, or use the 'remap' option to temporarily pull card definitions from a different dictionary.