disabling pinyin marking during flashcard importing

junlitsu

Member
Hello all,

I just bought pleco and am currently using the 2.0 beta RC1. I wanted to utilize it to learn the mandarin and cantonese pronunciations of some common chinese characters. So utilizing ccdict and a list of the most common chinese characters I created a text file with three columns per the pleco specifications. (character, pronunciation, definition). I have the pronunciations setup like this: mandarin pinyin | canto pinyin.

Unfortunately the pleco software tries to mark up the cantonese pinyin (and fails) e.g. 就 jiu4 | zau6 becomes 就 jiu4 | za5u56. I assume this is because while importing pleco normalises all input so when the pinyin w/tones or zhuyin (instead of pinyin w/ numbers) is selected it can be converted into tones. i.e. za is recognized as a valid word but zau is not, therefore u6 must be another word and the neutral tone is appended. but then 6 isn't a tone either resulting in another neutral tone being added, finally resulting in this monstrosity: za5u56 (at least that's my guess).

Anyways, I'd like to know if there's a way to prevent this from happening. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to pipe information from the char info feature into the flashcards (they seem pretty fixed) so I'm not sure of a better way to do this. Real cantonese integration would, perhaps, be too much to ask for but I'd be really happy if there's a way I can get this working. I apologise if this is in the wrong section and otherwise than this little snag, I've been nothing but pleased with pleco.

Thanks in advance!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
My best suggestion would be that you put the Cantonese in the definition instead of the pronunciation section of the card - that way the software wouldn't even try to run it through the Mandarin converter but would simply display it as written.

There's not necessarily anything wrong with leaving it in the pronunciation field and having it interpreted as Pinyin, though - those 5s wouldn't actually appear in the card as long as you kept the Mandarin rendering with tones instead of numbers, so you'd still end up with a card that looked like "zau6". You wouldn't be able to use the card in free-answer Pinyin tests, but in multiple-choice you'd probably be OK, since the length would be calculated based on the number of characters in the headword rather than the number of Pinyin syllables Pleco thought it saw.

One of the many things we're thinking about adding in a future version is the ability to define your own custom flashcard fields, so if we ever do that that would give you a way to have a separate field for Cantonese pronunciation, but there's no way to have anything but Mandarin come up reliably in the current pronunciation field. But at present the database is pretty strict about Pinyin formatting, and it has to be since we use it not only for rendering into several different Mandarin systems but also for searching and duplicate-checking cards.
 

junlitsu

Member
Thanks for the speedy response. I look forward to custom field definitions in the flashcard sections if they ever get implemented, but for now this should do.

Thanks again.
 
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