Top Flashcard Priorities?
- Thread starter mikelove
- Start date
GregBeijing said:
Thanks! That one got more-or-less inevitable once we licensed a TTS engine, just a question of when exactly we'll get it in.
eddymatthew said:
Major algorithm changes aren't likely to happen in this release - we're mostly just proposing to make it easier to access / understand what's going on with SRS - though the current algorithm is actually pretty close to Anki / Skritter / Mnemosyne et al already. We have added a few tweaks to make it more automated, though, like an "introduce N cards per day" option to replace the "no more than N unlearned cards" one.
eddymatthew
Member
thats definitely a good start because at the moment the Flashcard program has the feeling that it takes quite a lot of mucking around with the settings to get it to do what you want...i.e in terms of a SRS similar to that of anki/skritter etc...
When would some changes be considered for how an individual sessions are run, i.e. how unlearned cards are treated in relation to cards simply being retested...
for me, the flashcard program might actually be able to do what i want it to already but it is difficult for me to know...
When would some changes be considered for how an individual sessions are run, i.e. how unlearned cards are treated in relation to cards simply being retested...
for me, the flashcard program might actually be able to do what i want it to already but it is difficult for me to know...
- Streamlined SRS
- Improved/easier setup - or at least better documentation. I think its a incredibly powerful system but guess most people are stuck on simple flash card settings because they are intimidated by all the options. One solution might just be adding a few more presets.
- Improved/easier setup - or at least better documentation. I think its a incredibly powerful system but guess most people are stuck on simple flash card settings because they are intimidated by all the options. One solution might just be adding a few more presets.
Flash cards are good for rote memorization, however I find myself learning better with context.
Can flash cards with pictures be implemented?
Can context within a sentence be implemented so we can understand how a word is used?
What about voice input for flash cards to test tonal response?
How about statistics about words you frequently get wrong so you can get drilled on them?
Just a couple of ideas.
Can flash cards with pictures be implemented?
Can context within a sentence be implemented so we can understand how a word is used?
What about voice input for flash cards to test tonal response?
How about statistics about words you frequently get wrong so you can get drilled on them?
Just a couple of ideas.
icebear said:
Those are more-or-less what we ended up working on, along with iCloud. Though we may have to pull some of it from the update if it's not working well yet (but then it'll make it into the next one anyway).
Yojohnny said:
Yes, that's on our to-do list along with embedded audio.
Yojohnny said:
You can get those now by going into Flashcard Testing / Display and setting "Definition sections" to "Show All" or "No Xrefs" - that will make the examples from the dictionary show up on the card.
Yojohnny said:
The technology isn't really working well enough for that, particularly given the variety of regional accents / variations / etc.
Yojohnny said:
You can get this to some extent now with Search Cards - find all cards that have been incorrect a bunch of times - though we could certainly stand to make it easier.
Thanks for the feedback!
Mike,
I created flashcard categories from the HSK lists (1-6). When I'm looking up words in the dictionary, it would be great if I could easily tell which category (if any) an unfamiliar word belongs to.
I've worked through memorizing HSK 1-4, and starting on HSK5 now. When I see a new word in the dictionary, if I knew that it belonged to HSK 5 or 6 (or no HSK level), that bit of information would be very useful for me in determining what to do next with the new word (add it to my own list, or not add it to any list if I knew I would learn it eventually anyway in the HSK list, etc).
Currently the way I do this is to add a new word to a temporary category that I created, quit the dictionary and navigate to the "organize cards" section in the flashcards, find the word, and see which categories it belongs to. Then remove it from the temporary category. Ouch.
At the top of this topic you wrote:
Thanks for your consideration. Your app has gone a long way towards keeping me motivated to learn Chinese.
I created flashcard categories from the HSK lists (1-6). When I'm looking up words in the dictionary, it would be great if I could easily tell which category (if any) an unfamiliar word belongs to.
I've worked through memorizing HSK 1-4, and starting on HSK5 now. When I see a new word in the dictionary, if I knew that it belonged to HSK 5 or 6 (or no HSK level), that bit of information would be very useful for me in determining what to do next with the new word (add it to my own list, or not add it to any list if I knew I would learn it eventually anyway in the HSK list, etc).
Currently the way I do this is to add a new word to a temporary category that I created, quit the dictionary and navigate to the "organize cards" section in the flashcards, find the word, and see which categories it belongs to. Then remove it from the temporary category. Ouch.
At the top of this topic you wrote:
So it sounds like I will soon have the ability to at least see if a dictionary entry already has a flashcard... it would be nice to be able to tap that icon and either see the categories or navigate to the flashcard so I can see the categories.
Thanks for your consideration. Your app has gone a long way towards keeping me motivated to learn Chinese.
anchan42 said:
Honestly, we've got nice enough Skritter integration now (and potentially even nicer in the future) that we're not really sure if that's worth it when there are other needs we're more uniquely equipped to satisfy. There are plenty of interesting potential Chinese learning apps that nobody's written yet, so it seems like kind of a waste for two of the leading companies in the field to be working on the same thing.
I'm seriously disappointed with Skritter's position on Android development which is basically that they don't care that Flash (and the ability to run Skritter) is fast disappearing. Apparently their only priority is iOS and the "desktop" browser. I can sympathize with the challenges of supporting multiple platforms but, as an end user who carefully chose his mobile platform based on market share and openness, it doesn't please me at all. They also don't seem to be in a hurry to fix the major bugs in their Flash implementation.
I'd love to see an Android competitor.
Giraffe said:
It's just not worth developing our own Skritter knockoff for the sake of Android alone - Skritter already has the algorithms and the data, not to mention their excellent website, and we would need to come up with all of those things from scratch in order to have something competitive. And anywhere other than Android we'd have to deal with Skritter as a fierce and well-established competitor, not to mention the fact that I imagine they'd be much less interested in data sharing between our apps if we were actively trying to destroy them.
Plus, they're smart guys and I have to assume that they have good reason not to port to Android - I'm not privvy to any of their internal financial / subscriber / etc numbers, of course, but I imagine they've looked closely at metrics like how many Android users visit their website, how many people have signed up to their service as a result of the iPhone app (as opposed to their existing subscribers for whom it was just a lovely but non-revenue-generating bonus), how much email they get about this compared to the amount they were getting about an iPhone version, etc, and concluded on the basis of those that an Android port wouldn't be a good business move for them. Which is not to say that they're necessarily right, but it's not really a vote in favor of trying an Android stroke practice app ourselves.
Though on a not-quite-related note, I've been playing around with a new pressure-sensitive Bluetooth 4.0 stylus for my iPad a bit (certainly not something confined to iPad, they've got them on Android too) and I'm wondering whether there might be some potential for somebody to make a calligraphy practice app using it: not really something that's trying to actually teach you characters / words like Skritter does, but just something that's trying to teach you to write properly. Pick a few hundred common / calligraphically-important characters, make a really awesome paintbrush-simulating drawing pad (or heck, license code from one of the existing drawing apps - they'd probably be happy for the extra money as long as it didn't compete with them) and let people practice over and over again, first with a professionally-drawn character as the background, then next to it, then blind (checking against the character afterwords). Bonus points for actually analyzing the character shape and commenting on areas for improvement, though that would obviously be a lot harder.
Alexis said:
We're kind of waiting on iOS 7 for that, mainly because it seems like there's a very good chance that Apple will build a TTS API into iOS in which case it would be tough to justify building the necessary English TTS into Pleco. (Chinese we can still justify for offline use)