Feature request (various things)
- Thread starter Peter
- Start date
GanjaCubes
Member
flashcard testing fill the blanks is limited to 4 characters. Is it possible to have it unlimited in the future?
Tatarik - 晨星
举人
What I would looove to have 
- Dictionary of synonyms (top of the list!)
- Podcast lyrics reader
- Ability to set x seconds backwards and forwards in the lyrics reader environment (easier to navigate through audio files)
- Dictionary of synonyms (top of the list!)
- Podcast lyrics reader
- Ability to set x seconds backwards and forwards in the lyrics reader environment (easier to navigate through audio files)
There's an interesting Android App: pinyiner that add pinyin over characters / words. Pressing on a charachter and on the letter P can link directly to Pleco too! Pinyin over a character is a feature frequently requested...
SOME BUGS:
Pinyin display: When Settings->Language->Hide example pronunciation is checked, pinyin is still shown in the search results.
Recorded audio: While understand you can't really fix these, here's some more anyway:
梳头 : female actually pronunces '梳头发'
梳头发 : has no female pronunciation
笨拙 : pinyin reads ben4zhuo1, but both speakers pronounce it ben4zhuo2.
SOME FEATURE REQUESTS:
Sentences page: No matter how hard I try, my eyes always stray to the eglish definitions. Please provide a hovering toggle button to hide/display the english definitions.
Search results: When a search does not give immediately useful results, consider providing some 'help' to the student.
1. For sequences, of say less than say 4 chars, try different searching again with different permutations of the character order. I encountered this recently when searching for '萄葡'. Pleco could suggest 'perhaps you meant 葡萄?'
2. List top five, or so, example sentences that contain the search query.
3. Provide a button to run the search query on general purpose search engine, or online sentence database. i.e. launch web browser. e.g. baidu, google, bing, jukuu (http://www.jukuu.com/), iciba (http://www.iciba.com/).
Sentence search: Provide a way to find example sentences matching a (grammatical) pattern, e.g. '非...不可' or '～时～时'.
Pinyin display: When Settings->Language->Hide example pronunciation is checked, pinyin is still shown in the search results.
Recorded audio: While understand you can't really fix these, here's some more anyway:
梳头 : female actually pronunces '梳头发'
梳头发 : has no female pronunciation
笨拙 : pinyin reads ben4zhuo1, but both speakers pronounce it ben4zhuo2.
SOME FEATURE REQUESTS:
Sentences page: No matter how hard I try, my eyes always stray to the eglish definitions. Please provide a hovering toggle button to hide/display the english definitions.
Search results: When a search does not give immediately useful results, consider providing some 'help' to the student.
1. For sequences, of say less than say 4 chars, try different searching again with different permutations of the character order. I encountered this recently when searching for '萄葡'. Pleco could suggest 'perhaps you meant 葡萄?'
2. List top five, or so, example sentences that contain the search query.
3. Provide a button to run the search query on general purpose search engine, or online sentence database. i.e. launch web browser. e.g. baidu, google, bing, jukuu (http://www.jukuu.com/), iciba (http://www.iciba.com/).
Sentence search: Provide a way to find example sentences matching a (grammatical) pattern, e.g. '非...不可' or '～时～时'.
Actually bènzhuó is the correct pronunciation – in the Taiwan standard (compare its entry in the official Taiwan Ministry of Education dictionary: http://dict.revised.moe.edu.tw/cgi-bin/cbdic/gsweb.cgi?o=dcbdic&searchid=Z00000017158). But I looked up a few other words which I know are different as well (攻擊[-击] PRC: gōngjī TW: gōngjí; 突然 PRC: tūrán, TW: túrán; 傍晚 PRC: bàngwǎn, TW: bāngwǎn) and in all of these cases both recordings were in the PRC standard, so it’s definitely an inconsistency.
Also I second the request for the possibility to search for patterns with “holes” in the middle! Though I reckon it might be less of a technological problem than one of source material if most dictionaries don’t include full entries for these.
Sorry for the slow reply.
Will see about these bugs.
For English in examples, to be honest we haven't had many requests for an option to hide that - people who want to go Chinese-only usually have a Chinese-Chinese dictionary (hard to avoid English otherwise) and so can just hide PLC et al entirely and get their examples from that.
We do fall back on full text for searches now, but showing examples instead of the entries containing them makes sense. And we definitely need better fallback support both for permutations and character variants.
Wildcards in Full-Text searches are a good idea and not too hard to do.
Will see about these bugs.
For English in examples, to be honest we haven't had many requests for an option to hide that - people who want to go Chinese-only usually have a Chinese-Chinese dictionary (hard to avoid English otherwise) and so can just hide PLC et al entirely and get their examples from that.
We do fall back on full text for searches now, but showing examples instead of the entries containing them makes sense. And we definitely need better fallback support both for permutations and character variants.
Wildcards in Full-Text searches are a good idea and not too hard to do.
My experience with Pleco is positive. But when I talk about Pleco to friends who are native Spanish speakers, they are put off by the fact that Pleco is in English. Using an English-language app to learn Chinese when your maternal language is Spanish is just a bit too much for many of them.
So I was wondering: why not allow people to customize Pleco menus and messages? Native Spanish speakers might want a Pleco with menu items in Spanish. But some English speakers might want a Pleco with menu items in Chinese, for a more immersive learning experience. You could allow customisation using an ordinary text file which contains the menu items in English and their translation:
Words\tPalabras
Strokes\tTrazas
I really think that the lack of Spanish-language support is costing you sales.
So I was wondering: why not allow people to customize Pleco menus and messages? Native Spanish speakers might want a Pleco with menu items in Spanish. But some English speakers might want a Pleco with menu items in Chinese, for a more immersive learning experience. You could allow customisation using an ordinary text file which contains the menu items in English and their translation:
Words\tPalabras
Strokes\tTrazas
I really think that the lack of Spanish-language support is costing you sales.
We know it is, but we have a LOT of UI text we'd have to localize, and a consequence of our app's journey from Palm->Windows->iOS->Android is that a lot of that text is buried in deep / non-obvious places and not simply in a couple of resource files that we could send to a translator. So it's definitely a future goal for us but it'll be a monumentally complicated project when we do it which is why we haven't done it yet.
Four years of love for Pleco here, thanks Mike!
Bugs
For some reason I'm unable to search for entries in my user dictionary using their English definitions, frustrating when I know I've learned a word/phrase but am unable to locate it! (Not sure if this is a bug or just a problem with my settings!)
Feature Requests
As with Peter above I'd also like to see an option to hide English and pinyin in example sentences, I like to have the translation available for reference to check my understanding (so using chinese-chinese wouldn't be much help there) but find my eye will always stray to the pinyin/english when it's directly available. Would love a hide/reveal option!
Bugs
For some reason I'm unable to search for entries in my user dictionary using their English definitions, frustrating when I know I've learned a word/phrase but am unable to locate it! (Not sure if this is a bug or just a problem with my settings!)
Feature Requests
As with Peter above I'd also like to see an option to hide English and pinyin in example sentences, I like to have the translation available for reference to check my understanding (so using chinese-chinese wouldn't be much help there) but find my eye will always stray to the pinyin/english when it's directly available. Would love a hide/reveal option!