Flaschard pinyin autocorrect (and using Pleco for other languages?)

[maxiu]

Hi all, I have a question that is possibly wacky and probably has no answer, but it never hurts to ask

I've used Pleco flashcards for years with great success. In fact, I'm such a big fan that when I started studying other languages and went looking for another flashcard app for them, nothing held a candle to Pleco. I then realized that there was really nothing keeping me from using Pleco for these other languages. I tried it out with Latin (love me some dead languages), putting the Latin word into where the Pinyin would normally be (the tone option even lets me signify long vowels, sweet). However here I ran into a problem - when I type a non-Pinyin word into the Pinyin box, it autocorrects it to Pinyin. Thus, "Agricola" (farmer) autocorrects to AgriCONGle, "aqua" (water) become aQUAN, "natura" (nature) becomes natuRAN, etc. No matter what I do it is intent on taking what I type and not-so-helpfully finding what Pinyin it thinks I'm trying to type. The only thing I've found that somewhat helps is sticking a dash or apostrophe in the middle to break it up, e.g. agric'ola, aq'ua, natur'a, etc, but this is annoying.

I know this is slightly ridiculous and I'm really stretching the limits of what the app is designed to do, but hey, be happy I like the app so much that I want to explore a novel use for it! Anyway, I was wondering if there was some way to turn this autocorrect off or some other kind of workaround? Like, barring the ability to directly turn it off, is there some non-Pinyin option to select where it isn't going to care what I type? Thanks!

 

[mikelove]

If you type a @ at the start of your pinyin string, that will keep it form auto-correcting.

 

[maxiu]

Bingo. Thanks so much! I'm probably going to start using Pleco for all kinds of subjects which require flashcards.

 

[mikelove]

Cool! One thing I'd suggest there: create a category for each unique type of card content, and make sure you add all of the cards of that type to that category. (our 4.0 update introduces a notion of 'card types' with different semantic properties / populate settings / display settings / etc, and it'll be easier to take full advantage of that new system if you already have your cards organized by their future card type)

 

[leguan]

Great question, Maxiu!

If you type a @ at the start of your pinyin string, that will keep it form auto-correcting.

I have a related question.
Mike, is there any functionality in Pleco to selectively indicate which parts of the Pinyin string are the actual pinyin for the headword and which parts or not?

For example in the following "sentence contextual" flashcard, I would like to specify that "Jack" and "。" (as well as all the Chinese characters) are not to be treated as part of the Pinyin for the headword, and that only "zhi2de" is to be treated as the Pinyin.

值得
Jack觉得它很zhi2de5。
Jack thinks it is worth it.

Best regards
leguan

 

[mikelove]

If you insert a bunch of upside-down question marks ¿ in front of the 值得, those act as a 'tone coloring skip' character and so should allow you to align the zhi2de5 with the 值得.

 

[leguan]

Great, thank you!
Just to confirm, should my flashcard look exactly as follows?

¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿值得¿
Jack觉得它很zhi2de5。
Jack thinks it is worth it.

 

[leguan]

For your reference, when I tried to create a flashcard as per above, I got the following result. "Jack seems to still be being treated as Pinyin and the the Pinyin is not aligning. (The 得 character should be coloured grey as per the tone colouring rule I have specified for 5th tones, i.e., as per second screen shot)

 

[mikelove]

Hmm... well it is a bit of a hack, not sure what else to suggest in that case. (Maybe try putting the example in the Cantonese field instead?)

 

[leguan]

Hmm... well it is a bit of a hack, not sure what else to suggest in that case. (Maybe try putting the example in the Cantonese field instead?)

Thank you very much for your further suggestion. Unfortunately though, I wasn't able to achieve what I was trying to do using the Cantonese field either.

No worries though - as Pleco 4.0 surely can't be too far away now, I think it's best for me to now patiently wait for its arrival while imagining all the new possibilities that it will bring.