Need Help With Pleco Card Filters

[alec_ong]

I don't understand how to use pleco flashcards card filters. Can anybody recommend any settings for a Review test type (with SRS) And a New Words Test type?

little background about my problem:
I have been Using Pleco Flash Cards for over a year now. But the characters are not registering to my long term memory as well as the method that I used before which was reviewing all the notebooks (which had all the words that I learned over the course of my study) Everyday.

I stopped using this method and tried switching to pleco after I had over 3 Notebooks filled with characters and sentences which took too long (each day) to finish from end to end especially now since I have a job during the day.

Since I started using Pleco though, I found that It's not registering to my long term memory as well as the method that I had before.

Would appreciate any advice for this problem of mine.

 

[Shun]

Hello alec_ong,

you're touching on a pretty large topic. I think we can safely say that the key ingredient for being able to keep words in your long-term memory is repetition (often at the beginning, then at longer intervals towards the end). Studying from handwritten notebooks should allow you to repeat more material faster than by using Pleco, since with Pleco, you tend to see only one vocabulary item at a time, whereas a notebook gives you more freedom to look at specific things more closely and skip others, which should result in more efficient reviewing. But Pleco is great for studying and repeating new (or relatively new) vocabulary.

Instead of doing a score-based test where the test type is determined by the score of a card, I feel it's preferable to test yourself on all test types from the beginning to the end of the study phase, because in my experience, all types of tests need to be repeated in ever-longer intervals to enter long-term memory. Recommended test types are Fill-in-the-blanks from English to Chinese and Self-graded from Chinese to English, then towards the end Self-graded with Show: Audio, perhaps. So in my view, it should be preferable to use the Simple or Alternating subject selection instead of taking the Score-based route.

I agree on using card filters—for reviewing card categories you know quite well, you should enable a Record Filter or a Score Filter so you don't see any material you don't need to see. You probably know how to use these, or would you need some help?

A trick for long-term reviews: What I do when repeating words or constructions I already know quite well is, I open a category in Organize Flashcards and then scroll through all the flashcards without opening them, just looking at the visible parts at the upper/lower margin of the screen and testing myself on the invisible parts. (You may need to adapt the list layout in the Settings for this to work well.) That method should allow you to breeze through a lot of vocabulary in a short time. (easily hundreds) You can add any cards you didn't know to a new category.

On using SRS effectively, you can find a number of other threads on the Forums, but personally I have always used split categories and switching of testing modes back and forth between Chinese-English and English-Chinese (with a single scorefile).

Hope this helps,

Shun

 

[Shun]

Here are two suggestions on how to set the Card filter:

To study all cards with a score of less than 300



To study all cards you got right less than five times so far