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Anonymous
Guest
http://www.pleco.com/pdpreview.html doesn't mention doing english-chinese flashcards. I hope you're planning to make this possible!
A
Anonymous
Guest
What For?
All the years I've studied CHinese with physical flashcards, I always used them both ways - Chinese-English, and ENglish-Chinese. Once I knew the characters and pinyin, I'd jumble them up and flip them over. So part of it is just another way of randomizing the associations, and strengthening the learning.
As an entirely separate matter, I use them because I still occassionally operate in English, and want to have an automatic recall of the Chinese terms for common English phrases - this is particularly common for technical and financial terms.
Finally, in the same way that a single Chinese phrase or character can have many meanings, a single English phrase or word can have several possible Chinese meanings, depending on context. It's often useful to have all possible chinese meanings tied to one english word or phrase. Same reason you have an english-chinese dictionary, of course : but the whole reason for a flashcard is to simplify memorization of certain dictionary entries, and that need is as strong in one direction as another.
All the years I've studied CHinese with physical flashcards, I always used them both ways - Chinese-English, and ENglish-Chinese. Once I knew the characters and pinyin, I'd jumble them up and flip them over. So part of it is just another way of randomizing the associations, and strengthening the learning.
As an entirely separate matter, I use them because I still occassionally operate in English, and want to have an automatic recall of the Chinese terms for common English phrases - this is particularly common for technical and financial terms.
Finally, in the same way that a single Chinese phrase or character can have many meanings, a single English phrase or word can have several possible Chinese meanings, depending on context. It's often useful to have all possible chinese meanings tied to one english word or phrase. Same reason you have an english-chinese dictionary, of course : but the whole reason for a flashcard is to simplify memorization of certain dictionary entries, and that need is as strong in one direction as another.
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Anonymous
Guest
Eureka
As I wrote that last post, I realized that I can do English-Chinese by simply adjusting the "Test Session" dialog to show the first, and the character second.
My oversight but maybe this could be spelled out in the documentation more clearly as the method for doing English-Chinese flashcards.
As I wrote that last post, I realized that I can do English-Chinese by simply adjusting the "Test Session" dialog to show the first, and the character second.
My oversight but maybe this could be spelled out in the documentation more clearly as the method for doing English-Chinese flashcards.
A
Anonymous
Guest
I swotch among English meaning, pinyin and hanzi when I use flashcards. It feels to me as if Chinese to English is one part of my brain and English to Chinese is another.
Sandra
Sandra
Well yes, you can get something approaching English-to-Chinese flashcards simply by varying which fields you mask out, but you actually make a pretty good argument for why there should be separate English-to-Chinese ones; memorizing the standard translation for a particular English word is a lot easier when you have that word by itself then when you have a detailed English definition. Though you do miss some of the finer points of a particular word's meaning that way. Anyway, thanks for the detailed explanation.
A
Anonymous
Guest
70% of the way there
Yes, I agree with you Mike that controlling the masking of what's displayed is only a portion of what you'd want in English-Chinese flashcards - in my case, it's probably 70% of what I want.
The other part is essentially being able to link a single english word to MORE than one chinese character dictionary entry. That's probably another 25% of the way there.
Anyway, your product is very well-done, and I use it every day. Thanks for being so responsive!
Yes, I agree with you Mike that controlling the masking of what's displayed is only a portion of what you'd want in English-Chinese flashcards - in my case, it's probably 70% of what I want.
The other part is essentially being able to link a single english word to MORE than one chinese character dictionary entry. That's probably another 25% of the way there.
Anyway, your product is very well-done, and I use it every day. Thanks for being so responsive!
You're very welcome! There actually used to be a masking feature in our old Oxford Dict software (which also supported E-C flashcards), we took it out in PlecoDict because nobody seemed to be using it but it might make sense to add it back in now that we have an ever-growing selection of dictionaries.