samstravels
Member
Hi there
Firstly, to say I love your app (both iPhone and iPad) - the dictionary is great, totally indispensable for looking up words, and the portability is obviously amazing compared to desktop-based dictionary (Wenlin) I used before. Pleco also looks and feels nicer and has a far slicker interface, and is more intuitive in almost all ways...
...almost...
...but. I really want to love the flashcard function - it has clearly been designed to be as customisable as possible but try as I might I can't seem to wrestle it into being as simple, intuitive and downright addictive as the programme that helped me effortlessly learn hundreds of characters a week (Wenlin).
What Wenlin does, by default, which Pleco doesn't seem to do (no matter what combination of 'weighted, spaced repetition, repetition-spaced(!!), filters, etc), is to allow me to study a batch of characters at a time (chosen, I think, from my full collection on some scoring system like yours so ones I know well seldom come up, but mainly focused on any new ones I've just added - but this isn't the key point), and crucially, when I get one right shelves it for that round, and keeps showing me the ones I haven't got yet until I get it, and the round ends when I run out of cards. So if there are a couple I'm really struggling with I just end up with them alternating at the end.
This is the way I've always done it with physical flashcards and know a lot of others do, and it's very powerful and simple: I have a stack that I go through, creating a pile of discarded ones that I've got right, rotating through a shrinking stack I am studying.
There are other reasons I will continue to use Wenlin alongside Pleco, but I would love to be able to use flashcards on the go and find them as effective. Any thoughts much appreciated - I'm conscious it may well be that the many settings allow this and I have just failed to figure out how!
Thanks a lot in advance.
Firstly, to say I love your app (both iPhone and iPad) - the dictionary is great, totally indispensable for looking up words, and the portability is obviously amazing compared to desktop-based dictionary (Wenlin) I used before. Pleco also looks and feels nicer and has a far slicker interface, and is more intuitive in almost all ways...
...almost...
...but. I really want to love the flashcard function - it has clearly been designed to be as customisable as possible but try as I might I can't seem to wrestle it into being as simple, intuitive and downright addictive as the programme that helped me effortlessly learn hundreds of characters a week (Wenlin).
What Wenlin does, by default, which Pleco doesn't seem to do (no matter what combination of 'weighted, spaced repetition, repetition-spaced(!!), filters, etc), is to allow me to study a batch of characters at a time (chosen, I think, from my full collection on some scoring system like yours so ones I know well seldom come up, but mainly focused on any new ones I've just added - but this isn't the key point), and crucially, when I get one right shelves it for that round, and keeps showing me the ones I haven't got yet until I get it, and the round ends when I run out of cards. So if there are a couple I'm really struggling with I just end up with them alternating at the end.
This is the way I've always done it with physical flashcards and know a lot of others do, and it's very powerful and simple: I have a stack that I go through, creating a pile of discarded ones that I've got right, rotating through a shrinking stack I am studying.
There are other reasons I will continue to use Wenlin alongside Pleco, but I would love to be able to use flashcards on the go and find them as effective. Any thoughts much appreciated - I'm conscious it may well be that the many settings allow this and I have just failed to figure out how!
Thanks a lot in advance.