Random observations and feedback

Here are a few random comments, observations and things I would like to be able to do with Pleco:

- Report incorrect audio. Every once and a while, I encounter odd slip-ups in the recorded audio, and it would be nice if there were an easy way to report it (If it is in fact possible to update).

- Jump to the flashcard page. Sometimes when I look up a word in the dictionary that I happen to have a flashcard of, it occurs to me that I might want to check something about the flashcard, but there is no easy way to get there.

- A way to quarantine cards. Occasionally, I realize that I am just not remembering a certain card, and so I would like a way of putting it aside to study separately. What I have found is a setting called "exclude from all sessions," but there are two problems with this: First, it is not saved in a place that lets me rectify the problem, and second, I am not sure what exactly this excludes this flashcard from. In my case, I have several different profiles, and might want to exclude a card from the listening one, but not the reading one. Is that what exclude from all sessions does?

- A way to add a pause between two words when creating a custom flashcard for an expression where something is between two words, for example: 除了...以外. In this case, I happen to have this expression in the German HDD dictionary, and the entry includes a pause, but there are many other similar instances where I make a custom card and the automatic speech reads it as if it were one expression.

- Clipboard monitoring does not work reliably. Sometimes I will copy a word or phrase and Pleco simply doesn't open. When I open Pleco manually, and go to the clip reader page, the selected word is there, it's just that Pleco didn't open automatically like it should.

- Add a card limit function. I know this is a dead horse, but why not just add a max cards per session setting. I know it messes with the spaced repetition algorithm, but you could give a warning and let the users decide for themselves. The current method of reducing the number of cards by lowering the points per day does not yield predictable results. I know that some changes are planned for version 4.0, but this might not be so difficult as a quick fix while we're waiting

Thanks.

Jump to the flashcard page: you can get there by tapping on the [+] button and then Card Info.

Quarantine cards: best option there would be to create a new category for cards you want to exclude, add a 'category filter' to your test to skip cards in that category, and then add cards you want to quarantine to that. (can make these session-specific if you want, each session can have a different category it filters on)

Pause: is that pause reflected in the pinyin for the card? And the characters? (which one of those it goes by depends on whether you're using our audio or Google's)

Clipboard monitoring: known problem but thus far it's looking like it's on the Android side and may be difficult to work around, at least not without wasting lots and lots of battery.

Card limit: yeah, we're doing that in 4.0 too.

I've been a skeptic of SRS for language study since even before Anki showed up (if you dig around you can even find some very old forum posts to that effect) and remain one now - even if it made a difference whether you studied a card after 170 days or 230 days, the odds are pretty good that if it's actually a useful word you'll encounter it in the wild at some point before those days have elapsed, which makes the whole carefully-tuned sequence rather moot. However, until recently I had felt that if users bought our app believing in SRS, we had a responsibility to actually give them SRS, and not water it down to a point where it isn't doing what it purports to do.

Now, however, it's becoming increasingly clear that "SRS" in most customers' minds is not really SRS per se but rather a proxy for "statistics-driven flashcard study," i.e. it doesn't mean that you actually want to study cards at precisely increasing intervals but simply that you want some sort of algorithm making some effort to use the time you give it better than you would simply shuffling through the same deck of paper cards again and again. So while we do plan to retain the option for SuperMemo-era purists to have something as strict as the current system, the thrust of 4.0 is on letting you study cards however you like and simply trying to do a good job at surfacing cards that it would be helpful to study.

mikelove said:

Thanks.
Jump to the flashcard page: you can get there by tapping on the [+] button and then Card Info.

Click to expand...

Ah, I see. You left out a step - after tapping on the + button, you can choose a category, and if the card is in that category already, the duplicate flashcard window pops up, and from there you can get to the card info.

Quarantine cards: best option there would be to create a new category for cards you want to exclude, add a 'category filter' to your test to skip cards in that category, and then add cards you want to quarantine to that. (can make these session-specific if you want, each session can have a different category it filters on)

Click to expand...

Perfect solution!

Pause: is that pause reflected in the pinyin for the card? And the characters? (which one of those it goes by depends on whether you're using our audio or Google's)

Click to expand...

I'm afraid I don't understand ... In the audio section of settings I have Pleco Mandarin (Male & Female) both checked and System Mandarin not checked. Let me give you an example: I want to make a card for the pattern: 除非... 才 as in: 除非你去，我采取。 In pleco, I enter 除非, thinking maybe the pattern is there (the free German dictionary has quite a few such patterns). It isn't, so I add ...才. There is a+ sign to add the card and I make it, entering my definition. I then save it to one of my flashcard categories, and copy it from there to other categories if I want. When this card shows up during testing, I hear 除非才 with no pause. I know it is possible to add a pause, because the recordings in the German dictionary, for example of 既...又 have such a pause. How can I add it? (I've already tried just two dots, which is what it looks like in the German dictionary).

Ah, yes, if you have the option to prompt for categories on every flashcard add then there would indeed be that extra step. (you can actually configure Pleco in Settings / Flashcards to always bring up Card Info when you tap on the + button for an existing card, lowering it to just one step - have to disable that category prompting feature too, though, IIRC)

My question was whether there's also a ... in the pinyin reading for the card; is there? And have you also tried the ellipsis character … (looks the same but it's a single character)?

The dots do show up in the Pinyin. They are added automatically when the card is created. They are also editable. I have tried two dots, three dots and the ellipsis character, both with the Mandarin and the Pinyin, so far with no success.

Sorry, and which TTS engine are you using? Ours or Google's?

At Settings> Audio> Sentence Audio > System TTS Engine, the only choices are "Google Text-to-speech Engine" and "None." Changing the setting to "none" makes no difference.

Sorry, was referring to what's just underneath that - which TTS voices are checked, or which voice is selected under TTS Voice?

TTS Voice is set to cycle voices, and Pleco Mandarin (Male) and Pleco Mandarin (Female) are both checked. The system Mandarin and System Cantonese (both female) are not checked.

OK, then it's an issue with our TTS voices - thanks, will see what we can do on that.