How to separate usage between dialects/languages?

Chin

举人
I'm not sure how to word this but I was going over some sentences in Clipboard Reader and I came across a word that I didn't immediately understand its meaning. Pleco indicated that I already had made a flashcard for it but I didn't remember so I added it to the current category that I was making cards to study with. I then looked at the Card Info for that word and I saw that I had it listed under my Cantonese section. I immediately started thinking, "Oh no! This might be a problem!"

The reason is I don't know if there is a way to set up Pleco so I can know which language/dialect I associated a word with. I'm sorry if that doesn't make sense but meanings/connotations can change between language/dialects and I had no way of knowing that this particular character in question was in my Cantonese list until I checked it individually. This can be extremely time-consuming to do this for every character/word and even more so if one studies other dialects additionally.

Is there some way to remedy my issue here? Or will this be addressed in the big 4.0 update?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
At the moment my best suggestion would be that you configure the duplicate card handling behavior for "Duplicate (non cat)" to be "Card Info"; that way, when you tap on that partially-filled [+] button you'll immediately get to the card info screen and can decide from there whether you still want to add it to the category or not.

On the larger question I guess I'm not quite sure of the issue - why would the fact that you already had a card for this word in Cantonese preclude you from also wanting to add it to your new study category? Wouldn't it still be relevant to study either way? Plenty of words have distinct meanings in Cantonese and Mandarin, after all. Do you just need an easier way to see which categories a card is in?
 

Chin

举人
Please excuse the late reply, I guess what I wanted to suggest is perhaps something like a color coded option for the highlight that appears when one checks the definition of a character in the clipboard reader mode. Currently, it is only one color, blue. But what if other options were available, for example, if I could select to have Red represent Mandarin and say, Blue represent Cantonese (and another color, brown, represent both). That way I would know immediately what meaning I have already studied for a word that may have different meanings in Mandarin/Cantonese. Thoughts?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We actually are adding options to color text in the reader based on criteria about words, so if you had a good way to identify which words are Cantonese or Mandarin (e.g. words in specific dictionaries or in a specific list were considered Cantonese) I think you could get it working that way, but this would be regular text, not highlights - we're not currently planning to let you customize the highlight color on a word-specific basis. (would be theoretically possible to add that at some point, but since it's weird / non-standard UI to have the highlight color randomly change like that it would take a lot of user requests for me to consider it)
 
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