Feature Suggestion

[jiyan]

Hi,

Been using Pleco for a while now and I find it irreplaceable.

However lately I find myself wishing another feature was available. Sometimes one comes across a new word that sounds, or is pronounced, similar to other words.

Thus it would be really useful to have a compare option where you choose the words you want to compare and then they can be displayed in a similar fashion like when you are entering a sentence and the application breaks it down to words.

The way to select words might be by double tapping or long pressing or even dragging the word to a screen corner.

Thanks

 

[mikelove]

Why not just enter the two words in the search box now? You can add a space between them to force Pleco to separate them rather than attempting to join them.

 

[jiyan]

Some reasons that I can think of is no support of pinyin, it didn't work for me at least, and the non possibility for subsequent additions.

Think of it as list of words.

 

[Peter]

Inserting a space between search terms in the search box doesn't work here (pleco 3.2.22). For example, if you search for "秘 密", Pleco returns the noun "秘密".

 

[mikelove]

@jiyan - the problem with doing it with Pinyin is you'd get too many results for each block; this is also why our search breakdown feature isn't supported for Pinyin, you'd end up with an unholy mess of dozens of even hundreds of matches for each 'word'. Also gives us no way to intelligently segment text, so we'd have to use the dumbest possible algorithm and match greedily (= match as long a word as possible), which means half the time you'd end up with some random 成语 that happened to have the same four syllables as the two words you were looking for.

One thing we could consider adding, however, would be an option to build a search string out of multiple words by typing one word at a time, finding it, and adding it to some sort of 'meta search,' a longer sentence you were composing that you could then display in a breakdown, add to flashcards as an example sentence, etc. We've been playing around with this a bit anyway for custom example sentence creation purposes. Wouldn't really do much beyond a regular Pinyin IME aside from the fact that it was giving you definitions for the word choices, though. (we might also just do an IME, actually, Chinese-IME-with-definitions would be interesting in other places too)

@Peter - Sorry, I said a space when I should have said a comma - '秘,密" will give you two separate results. We ignore spaces since they seem to get inserted in lots of Chinese texts in places where they don't belong.