Flashcard overhaul wishlist

[etm001]

Highlighting flashcard words in a document is also something I'm not wild about, though that one's had quite a few requests

Another visual indicator, such as a superscripted symbol at the end of a word/term, could serve the same purpose without being distracting. (And all the better if you can toggle this on/off).

I'd be more inclined to keep them invisible in the document but to add an extra step to view their definitions

Just to play devil's advocate: isn't the reading experience disrupted every time the user has to tap? How does adding an extra tap create a less disruptive experience to the user? Although I didn't state it explicitly in what I wrote earlier, to me tapping is disruptive to the reading experience. The less I tap, the better.

In current/classic reader functionality, tapping is of course required to select an unknown word and reveal its definition. But in the "flashcard+reader" scenarios that I'm describing, there is a defined set of words with an extremely high probability of being selected by the user (e.g., flashcard words). How can Pleco quickly and easily present this information to the user in the least disruptive way possible?

With this split mode you're talking about, why does it even need to be split screen at all? Seems like it would be easier to simply show little correct / incorrect buttons in the reader bubble or in a toolbar somewhere.

I came up with the "split screen" solution because, to me, casting my glance from the lefthand "reader pane" to the righthand "flashcard pane" is faster and less disruptive than lifting my arm/hand and tapping twice to view the definition (or lifting my arm/hand to do anything, frankly). And I think that's even more true if the two panes are "scroll locked" such that as I scroll the reader's lefthand pane (again, that pane should be given the most real estate as possible) the relevant flashcards are displayed in the righthand pane.

I'm not really seeing the utility of the extra list of flashcards - feels like you're being taken out of the document context in precisely the situation where you're trying hard to stay within it.

We both want to minimize the disruption to the reading experience and just have different thoughts about what constitutes disruption, or how disruptive a given action is. As an end user, if I'm explicitly enabling the flashcard functionality in reader, then I'm willing to accept (or frankly want) a UI experience that (probably in your mind) takes away from the current "clean/pure" reader UI (basically a display of text) because I'm not using reader "just to read" anymore. (And if the flashcard functionality can be toggled, then I can always go back to the "clean" reader experience at will).

In the end, please do think about how you can minimize tapping (obviously I find tapping the most disruptive). So for example:

for example, a little message in the popup bubble telling you this is a flashcard word and offering to reveal it when tapped

So let's say there's no split screen UI, etc., and you still have to tap-select the flashcard word to see underlying information. OK I accept that. But I'd really want you to experiment with different UIs that could eliminate that second tap.

I know you're not keen on a split screen UI, so I tried to think of a solution that integrates some of this functionality without it, but which stays true to a "clean" reader UI experience: what about having a small visual indicator at the end of each paragraph? If it's present, than it means the paragraph contains flashcard words. If you tap the indicator, flashcard words within the paragraph are visually indicated (however you decide to do that), and a scrollable list of the cards is displayed. (I'd leave it up to you as to how to display the list: slide-out pane, pop-up window/bubble, anchored window at the bottom of the reader display, etc). I feel a solution like this still provides a very clean UI/experience, but gives a quick option for displaying flashcard information when needed, and even better, just for the text currently being read.

 

[mikelove]

We seem to be talking about two very different usages; what you're describing sounds more like what one would want with a graded reader or a textbook, something used to introduce new vocabulary. It's a reasonable UI for that - a direction we can look at going if we're successful with licensing / releasing graded readers in Pleco (as we'd like to do) - but I don't get the impression that a lot of people are using the reader for that right now, in part because of the difficulty of finding graded reading materials to use with it.

If you already know or are in the process of learning most of these flashcard words, it seems like making it easier to look them up is the last thing we want to do; we want to encourage you not to be lazy but to try to remember a word before looking it up. So the one tap to look up any word is a reasonable baseline, and the extra tap for flashcards encourages you to really think hard before giving up and asking for the definition. We agree that tapping is a disruption, but I consider it a useful kind of disruption; highlighting flashcard vocabulary, on other hand, disrupts you when you're trying to remember a word, before you've "given up" and tapped on it.

 

[etm001]

I never thought about this in the context of a graded reader. It certainly would be great if one day you could license that kind of material and present it within Pleco.

What I'm describing facilities study whereby you have a body of text and set of unknown words that either a) have been pre-defined for you (i.e., as in a textbook chapter), or b) you define yourself as you read the text. By way of example, I use reader every day to read newspaper and magazine articles sourced from the web or that I scan; I create a set of flashcards to accompany the article; I use flashcard functionality to learn the words; I re-read the article in reader; I study the flashcards again...you get the idea. With current functionality I have to leave the native text behind in order to review/test on the flashcard words. In the end, anything that helps keep that native text front-and-center while allowing me to utilize some flashcard functionality (however it's implemented) would be welcomed.

 

[xiang1jiao1]

I'd really like to have a way to create cards (or even just a ref list) that includes the context from the source in which I saw the word. I.e., when I'm reading a doc in the reader and find myself looking up a word, I'd like to be able to create a card that allows me to see later (when reviewing the card) the original sentence context (as well as perhaps a link to the original article). Is that what you mean by 'contextual sentence integration'?

Just checking on this feature... Last year you mentioned it was in the works. Any updates? Thanks!

 

[mikelove]

Yes, still in the works, trying to consolidate a few things about how we handle document reading first.