Flashcard Question

[Lijie]

I have a problem when it comes to using flashcards to study. When I encounter words I've never seen before, if they have one character I know, when it comes to the pinyin option, by elimination I can guess the pinyin. Also sometimes just looking at the two characters that form the word, I guess the meaning. Does that really help me memorize them? I played around with the testing options and right now I only see 30 cards a day ( I have about 6000 flashcards that I'm supposed to be testing myself on which I still haven't fully gone through). I don't know if I should increase the number. I just thought of this but I think it would be nice if Pleco could send a push notification and remind me to check my flashcards everyday. Also to the people who use the flashcard system, do you only use the flashcard system or do you also write them down and make sentences with them?
I know everything is a bit messy(It's messy in my brain too). Pleco Flashcards has so many options I don't know how to adjust it to fit me.

 

[mikelove]

That's a tough question... have you thought about trying other test modes, such as showing the definition and recalling the characters? The fill-in-the-blanks mode can also be useful since it forces you to not just recall the Pinyin but to recall it with perfect tones, something a lot of even very advanced learners have trouble with.

For push notifications, if it's a daily reminder then why not just set a regular Android system alarm? Frankly I'm a little wary of adding push notification support because on Android that means yet another permission to request, and while some permissions may be innocuous (we just added "check license status" and "check network state" and nobody seemed to mind), others are decidedly less so - we get emails regularly about the camera one, for example, since many people don't know we support OCR. And push notifications are very much in that latter category - people see that and don't understand why a dictionary would need to send out push notifications and think we're going to spam them with messages asking them to buy stuff and end up deciding not to download our app.

(this is one area I can say iOS is definitively superior - users only have to grant permission for things like location services and push notifications and camera access at the time they actually use those features, not on installing the app)

 

[Lijie]

I feel like if there's a constant push notification icon at the top reminding me how lazy I am for not looking at my flashcards, it'll motivate me to do it haha. But I understand that some people don't want to agree to push notifications. I'm going to keep going with multiple-choice for now and test it out properly. If it doesn't really do anything I'll switch to fill-in-the-blanks. It already made a word reappear and I remembered the definition while still at the pinyin part. Maybe It'll work ^o^
Also. I know this might be to much to ask right now, but can we expect being able to select more than one test type in future updates? Suppose I want to test multiple-choice and Fill-in-the-blanks. Surely I wouldn't know how the concept would work but maybe just randomly switching.