surprise me

A

Aunty

举人
There's only one thing I still use a paper dictionary for.

I close my eyes, open a random page, throw my fingertip down and open my eyes. There (or therabouts) I find an interesting word that I'd never have discovered otherwise, and it leads me to related interesting words or idioms. It's naughty, it's fun, and it's a great warm-up on those days when you can't get into the mood for serious study.

It would be great if PlecoDict had a "surprise me" command that did something similar. Oh it's not very important, but it might be something that's very quick and easy to throw into the next version, so I'm seeding the idea here in case.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Should be possible (and pretty easy), but we really have to be extremely militant about additional new features if we want to get 2.0 out sometime this decade, so even little things like this may have to wait for a later update. But thanks for the suggestion!
 
S

sfrrr

状元
Aunty Sue--I love the serendipity of looking up one word, then finding, by chance, another interesting-looking word and following all its connections. It's one of the main joys of studying.

But I'm not sure I need this as a plecodict feature. I already do this frequently. I see another word close by and follow its paths. Just as I used to do with Zhongwen, both book and web site. And the icing on the cake here is that the serendipity word, being within viewing distance of my initial target word, pertains, at least remotely, to my target word.

So, I guess I'd vote that this is already a feature and that Mike shouldn't add any more features, no matter how useful, until he gets 2.0 out the door and onto our PDAs.

Sandra
 
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