2.0 or later handling of flashcards

[mikeo]

I use Pleco's dictionary and flashcards every day, and there's a question I've been meaning to ask about 2.0.

Often if the flashcard item is more than one character, and especially for chengyu, I want to do lookups (or drills) of the constituent characters, then return to the flash cards where I diverged. There's no way to do this now without quitting and restarting. It would be very nice if there was a way in 2.0.

If not, it's almost certainly to late to make it in, but maybe for 3.0?

 

[mikelove]

This is not in the works for 2.0, I'm afraid; it should be possible to pull up definitions for the individual characters, but we're not planning to allow you to test/drill them separately. For that, you'd need to create separate entries for each of the characters in question. But it should be possible to do that from the definition pop-ups, so combined with the new session save / resume feature you're working on you could probably get something similar to this with a few extra taps required to create the cards / save the session / start a new session using those cards / exit that session / return to the saved one.

 

[mikeo]

Just being able to get a definition, while drilling, of the chengyu constituent characters, would cover 80-90% of desirability. Not so important to drill the characters separately - often, you know the character, but in the chengyu it has a different meaning/tone taken from classical chinese - this is why you want to look it up.

 

[bpetrini]

Suggestion for FlashCard system

Absolutely fantastic software! Have been living in Beijing since last August and only first heard about this software 2 weeks ago and already tried it out, bought it for PPC and have been tripling my daily vocabulary thanks to the handwriting recognizer. I'm recommending this to all my Ex-pat colleagues and my wife just purchased the Palm version. I wish I had known about it before I came to China and begun studying Chinese.

I'm taking a Mandarin class at Beijing Language and Culture University and the text books have 40 lessons with approximately 20-25 words in each lesson. In addition we get supplemental vocabulary associated with each lesson when the instructor explains the standard vocabulary (for example "traffic" is standard, but we'll also get "traffic light" and "traffic rules") in class. I'm pretty sure this would be the same in other formal Chinese language classes.

What I would like to be able to do is to create a hierarchical flashcard list. An example would be:
Book 1
_|---->Lesson 1
______|-----> Regular
______|-----> Supplement
_|---->Lesson 2
______|-----> Regular
______|-----> Supplement
_|---->Lesson 3
______|-----> Regular
______|-----> Supplement
...
_|---->Lesson 40
______|-----> Regular
______|-----> Supplement
Book 2
_|---->Lesson 1
______|-----> Regular
______|-----> Supplement
...

I also have the Integrated Chinese books (Level 1 Part 1 Text- and Work-books) since they explain better than BLCU books, and they also have regular and supplemental vocabulary.

It would be great to be able to say I only want lessons 1-26 of book 1, or all of book 1 and lessons 1-12 of book 2. Also to be able to select just regular, just supplemental or both. This would make studying for exams much easier.

I have imported the Integrated Chinese Flash Card list from Flash Card Exchange and it is one large list with all 1154 vocabulary words from the book. This would be very intimidating for someone who is just starting out with the book.

The way I currently do it now is create a single list for each lesson and then manually select each lesson. But then I will have 80 lists for each book (40 regular and 40 supplemental). This makes it a pain to export/import.

Looking forward to version 2.0. Have read about categories in flash cards 2.0, but don't know how helpful they would be for this issue.
I do think this software would be even more popular with students if they could have flash cards easily configured for the lessons that they've covered.

 

[mikelove]

This is already in 2.0 (in as in "we've written the code that enables it") so it should be fixed then. We were originally going to support 2 category levels and now are supporting three, so the structure you've outlined in your post should be completely achievable in 2.0.