Hi,
First of all let me say I am a dedicated Pleco user and a strong advocate (my lastest verbiage is "...it goes without saying that you want this dictionary; every student I have talked to, whether geek or technophobe, calls it the most important learning tool they have...")
What I am wondering is whether Pleco would consider adding some functionality to the flash cards. Specifically what I am looking for is an additional way to manage the words; in my desktop software (an Access application based on the CEDICT dictionary) I call it a "Task Basket."
The idea behind a Task Basket is that we can't neatly divide the characters we are studying into "Know/Don't Know" or "Got Right/Got Wrong." The fact is, some characters I know what they mean, but I forgot how they're pronounced (Hanzi > English = Pass, but Hanzi > Pinyin = Fail). Some words I know how to say, but I don't know the character (English > Pinyin = Pass, English > Hanzi = Fail).
With Chinese, there are three main elements of information: Characters; Pinyin/Pronunciation; "meaning" (for me, English)...let's call them "Cues," since they are the candidates for presentation on a flash card.
Pleco's flash card functionality, like many flash card programs, allows me to control which Cues I want to see and which will be hidden (we can call the hidden ones "Answers"). I can change which elements are Cues and which ones are Answers each time I start a flash card session.
What the program does not (yet?) allow me to do is:
1. Define multiple different Cue/Answer pairings ("Tasks")
2. Put Tasks in order; that is, consistently promote words from one Task to the next
3. Group words together based on their membership in a Task (which represents how well the have been learned, and is almost certainly different from their membership in a Lesson, since some members of the Lesson are learned immediately, while others stick in one's craw for weeks).
This is the functionality I first implemented in my vocab management program. It allows you to define a Task, which includes a set of Cues and corresponding Answers...for example:
Task 0: Show Character and Pinyin, Expect Meaning
Task 1: Show Character, Expect Pinyin and Meaning
Task 2: Show Meaning, Expect Pinyin
Task 3: Show Pinyin, Expect Character
Task 4: Show Meaning, Expect Character
...as you can see, this set of Task definitions takes the learner from character recognition (an easy task) to character production (a much more difficult task), with a short stop at oral production (the Meaning > Pinyin step). I have found this to be a very natural progression and would recommend it to new learners (though I think it should be implemented in a way that each user can define and change).
Since the Tasks are ordered from easy to hard, it makes sense to promote vocabulary items from Task 0 to 1 to 2 to 3...and so on. For this reason I also call the Tasks "Bins," as at any given time each Task may "contain" a number of "cards." Note that the vocab items in any given Bin (that is, at any given stage in the learning process) may have come from different Lessons. This reflects the simple fact that we learn some items in each Lesson faster than others.
Although this seems like a very fundamental change (indeed, for the learner it may amount to a fundamentally different approach to flash-card learning), from a database perspective it does not involve that much data. Each item which has been added to a Vocabulary List would have a number representing its current Bin (Task); and each Task would have to be defined as including one or more Cues (which are already implemented, since the program already allows the user to choose which Cues to show for each flash card session).
Note that the Task Basket implementation saves you the trouble of tracking which items you "Got Right" and "Got Wrong." "Got Right/Wrong" doesn't map onto any real learning stage anyway, since whether you get an item right or wrong depends on what cues are available, which you can change with each flash card session. If you get it right, promote to next Bin. If you got it wrong, keep it in its current Bin. If you quiz yourself on each Bin each day, your words will slowly (some more slowly than others!!) march toward mastery.
Finally, this single change enables another very powerful and interesting capability. No matter how many Bins a user defines (I used to use ten but have cut back to six), the top bin represents words the user considers "learned." Counting the items in this bin, then, represents the user's active vocabulary! (if the Bins are defined and ordered carefully, one of the lower Bins should represent the user's passive vocabulary). This is a great motivational tool and it makes a cool graph.
I hope that you will consider this idea, which has done wonders for my character-learning and I am sure could help many other learners. How many times have you tested yourself on a Lesson, wasting 50% of your time slogging through words you knew you would get right, all to test yourself on the 50% you hadn't yet mastered? But you couldn't delete those items from the Lesson...if only you could get them out of the way by promoting them to another stage of learning, which would be represented by a different challenge/response drill (a different set of cues, i.e. a different "Bin").
If Task Bins is a lot to implement in your flash card utility (which admittedly is a sideshow to your indispensable dictionary), I hope you will consider importing from .txt files rather than .pdb for non-Palm-literate developers like me! I could export my current "Bins" to .txt in no time flat.
Thanks for a great program, thanks in advance for considering this idea, and thanks to all for laboring through a long long post!!
PHW
PS Any time Pleco People are in Hai Dian the pizza is on me. PHW
First of all let me say I am a dedicated Pleco user and a strong advocate (my lastest verbiage is "...it goes without saying that you want this dictionary; every student I have talked to, whether geek or technophobe, calls it the most important learning tool they have...")
What I am wondering is whether Pleco would consider adding some functionality to the flash cards. Specifically what I am looking for is an additional way to manage the words; in my desktop software (an Access application based on the CEDICT dictionary) I call it a "Task Basket."
The idea behind a Task Basket is that we can't neatly divide the characters we are studying into "Know/Don't Know" or "Got Right/Got Wrong." The fact is, some characters I know what they mean, but I forgot how they're pronounced (Hanzi > English = Pass, but Hanzi > Pinyin = Fail). Some words I know how to say, but I don't know the character (English > Pinyin = Pass, English > Hanzi = Fail).
With Chinese, there are three main elements of information: Characters; Pinyin/Pronunciation; "meaning" (for me, English)...let's call them "Cues," since they are the candidates for presentation on a flash card.
Pleco's flash card functionality, like many flash card programs, allows me to control which Cues I want to see and which will be hidden (we can call the hidden ones "Answers"). I can change which elements are Cues and which ones are Answers each time I start a flash card session.
What the program does not (yet?) allow me to do is:
1. Define multiple different Cue/Answer pairings ("Tasks")
2. Put Tasks in order; that is, consistently promote words from one Task to the next
3. Group words together based on their membership in a Task (which represents how well the have been learned, and is almost certainly different from their membership in a Lesson, since some members of the Lesson are learned immediately, while others stick in one's craw for weeks).
This is the functionality I first implemented in my vocab management program. It allows you to define a Task, which includes a set of Cues and corresponding Answers...for example:
Task 0: Show Character and Pinyin, Expect Meaning
Task 1: Show Character, Expect Pinyin and Meaning
Task 2: Show Meaning, Expect Pinyin
Task 3: Show Pinyin, Expect Character
Task 4: Show Meaning, Expect Character
...as you can see, this set of Task definitions takes the learner from character recognition (an easy task) to character production (a much more difficult task), with a short stop at oral production (the Meaning > Pinyin step). I have found this to be a very natural progression and would recommend it to new learners (though I think it should be implemented in a way that each user can define and change).
Since the Tasks are ordered from easy to hard, it makes sense to promote vocabulary items from Task 0 to 1 to 2 to 3...and so on. For this reason I also call the Tasks "Bins," as at any given time each Task may "contain" a number of "cards." Note that the vocab items in any given Bin (that is, at any given stage in the learning process) may have come from different Lessons. This reflects the simple fact that we learn some items in each Lesson faster than others.
Although this seems like a very fundamental change (indeed, for the learner it may amount to a fundamentally different approach to flash-card learning), from a database perspective it does not involve that much data. Each item which has been added to a Vocabulary List would have a number representing its current Bin (Task); and each Task would have to be defined as including one or more Cues (which are already implemented, since the program already allows the user to choose which Cues to show for each flash card session).
Note that the Task Basket implementation saves you the trouble of tracking which items you "Got Right" and "Got Wrong." "Got Right/Wrong" doesn't map onto any real learning stage anyway, since whether you get an item right or wrong depends on what cues are available, which you can change with each flash card session. If you get it right, promote to next Bin. If you got it wrong, keep it in its current Bin. If you quiz yourself on each Bin each day, your words will slowly (some more slowly than others!!) march toward mastery.
Finally, this single change enables another very powerful and interesting capability. No matter how many Bins a user defines (I used to use ten but have cut back to six), the top bin represents words the user considers "learned." Counting the items in this bin, then, represents the user's active vocabulary! (if the Bins are defined and ordered carefully, one of the lower Bins should represent the user's passive vocabulary). This is a great motivational tool and it makes a cool graph.
I hope that you will consider this idea, which has done wonders for my character-learning and I am sure could help many other learners. How many times have you tested yourself on a Lesson, wasting 50% of your time slogging through words you knew you would get right, all to test yourself on the 50% you hadn't yet mastered? But you couldn't delete those items from the Lesson...if only you could get them out of the way by promoting them to another stage of learning, which would be represented by a different challenge/response drill (a different set of cues, i.e. a different "Bin").
If Task Bins is a lot to implement in your flash card utility (which admittedly is a sideshow to your indispensable dictionary), I hope you will consider importing from .txt files rather than .pdb for non-Palm-literate developers like me! I could export my current "Bins" to .txt in no time flat.
Thanks for a great program, thanks in advance for considering this idea, and thanks to all for laboring through a long long post!!
PHW
PS Any time Pleco People are in Hai Dian the pizza is on me. PHW