Sentence cards question

[bpa]

Hi, I’ve been playing around with the new flashcards, and can’t figure out if it’s possible to create sentence cards linked to a specific word.

What I want:

1. Create a flashcard for a word
2. Link the sentence context it was found in
3. When reviewing, show the sentence on the front of the card, and the definition for the word on the back. (i.e., the card is not a sentence card like in Pleco 3, but a normal vocab card; it just shows the linked example on the front of the card.)

I’ve discovered the sentence card button option, which handles the first two, but I’m not sure if it’s possible to have it test the word in this way.

The advantage of this over just making a sentence card, is that the statistics etc. are linked to the target word, and that copying the word’s definition manually to the back of the sentence card is tedious.

(I’ve actually been doing a dirty hack in Pleco 3 for a while to achieve this: I add a user definition for a word, but it’s actually the context sentence. Then I set that ‘definition’ as the the default for the card, and test it Def->headword)

Anyway, I’d be interested to see if there’s a way to do this process in 4.0

Thanks!

 

[mikelove]

The 'cloze' test modes basically do this - and with preference for sentences linked from the card - but they hide the word in the sentence so you have to remember it. It seems like what you basically want is a cloze test but with the word still there (I guess bolded or underlined or something so you know which word this is about?) and then on the back instead of showing a translation for the sentence we show a definition for the word?

 

[bpa]

Yes, exactly. Highlighting the word in some way would be nice as an option, but not necessary.

The basic idea is that the context makes remembering ambiguous or abstract words a bit more intuitive - instead of trying to reproduce the dictionary definition during the test, you just read the sentence and pass the card if you understood it.

Some background on where this style comes from: there was a site called ‘antimoon’ that popularized an English-learning method of intensive immersion while making these kinds of sentence cards. Another guy later had a blog called AJATT (All Japanese All the Time) about using it for learning Japanese, which is where I came across it. There’s also a system called Refold now that seems fairly popular with (nerdy/tech) Japanese learners, but I don’t really follow them much. All that to say I’m probably not the only one using it for Chinese, so if you considered adding this style of test, there would probably be some other people who would appreciate it

 

[mikelove]

Thanks. I don't think this is something we'd offer as a built-in test type, at least not right away, but it shouldn't be too difficult to add a checkbox in custom cloze test types to simply not mask the clozed text and to show the original definition instead of the one for the sentence.

 

[bpa]

Yeah the cloze test solution would work perfectly for me, thanks for considering it !