[Unofficial] Feature Request / Suggestion List

[jurgen85]

MOE's citations are nice and hidable, but for some reason has its own examples inline. Occasionally they are very verbose which can make things harder to navigate, especially on a small screen. E.g. 想 (as it flows on my device):

動

1. 思索、思考。如：「想辦
   法」、「想不出所以然」。
2. 欲、要、打算、希望。如：
   「想結婚」、「想出國」。
3. 推測、猜度。如：「料
   想」、「推想」、「猜
   想」。
4. 認為、覺得。如：「你想這
   樣對不對？」、「我想你應
   該回家一趟。」
5. 思念、懷念。如：「想
   念」。
6. 似、像。

名 念頭、意念。如：「夢
想」、「理想」、「不作此
想」。

while the core defintion is much shorter and simpler to read:

動
1 思索、思考。
2 欲、要、打算、希望。
3 推測、猜度。
4 認為、覺得。
5 思念、懷念。
6 似、像。

名 念頭、意念。

so it would be fantastic to turn these into examples (and possibly also making citations and examples independently hidable).

 

[mikelove]

Makes sense, thanks.

 

[Knil]

It would be great to have an upcoming review calendar showing the number of cards that are due on upcoming days. My number of due cards often fluctuates wildly (e.g. between 70 and 200+ cards), especially depending on the times of day I do the review, so without being able to check how many cards are really due on the day or in upcoming days, it is very difficult to gauge whether now is a good or bad time to add new cards. (I've found the number of unlearned cards can be an uninformative metric as that can also vary wildly from day to day, especially since I add a lot of new cards so there are a lot that are just in short-term memory). Even having a simple list of the current and upcoming 7 days of number of expected reviews would be helpful!

I saw that there was a feature suggestion for this a while back, but I wasn't able to find information about it since. Is this something that's in the works for the next version of Pleco?

 

[mikelove]

It is something you could theoretically get with our new statistics screen - plot due dates on a bar graph - but at the same time, we are actually strongly pushing against the idea of specific due dates for any card that you expect to be in long-term memory (i.e. one that's not recently introduced or recently forgotten) in our default profile. So you can still get it - with the "Pleco Legacy" profile which mimics our old behavior, or, if you import an Anki deck, then with the Anki emulator settings profile we offer for people migrating from Anki, or with a custom profile that uses whatever crazy system you want - but the system we'll be steering people towards pretty much ignores that.

The default behavior now is that all long-term memory cards are placed in a big 'review pool', without any particular attempt to calculate algorithmically optimal intervals for them - we just draw cards from that pool (sorted by approximate date of last review) in whatever number will fill out the number of reviews you want to do right now. Basically the priority is:

- forgotten
- recently started learning
- brand new
- review

So if you're reviewing 100 cards and you have 100 cards in the first two categories, you would not see any new cards or any review cards in this session. If you're reviewing 100 cards and you have 95 forgotten + recent + new, you'd only see 5 review cards. On the other hands, if you have hardly any cards in the first few categories then you might have a test consisting mostly of review cards. The main thing is that reviews are no longer considered high-priority, since with long-term memory (and, moreover, long-term memory of something that you're probably also encountering outside of our app from time to time) there isn't really a clear exponential decay and hence there isn't really a good reason to worry about reviewing something on a particular due date.

 

[Knil]

Interesting, I never thought about this kind of system for cards in long-term memory, but that makes a lot of sense. Looking forward to seeing it!

 

[jurgen85]

Prioritize flashcards by number of categories

I add flashcards to new categories based on chapter, lesson, etc., and it would make sense to prioritize those that are common. This would also be more relevant to each individual user than a general frequency priority.

 

[mikelove]

Interesting - thanks!

 

[jurgen85]

More ideas inspired by my small screen:

1. Showing both character sets, but not for words longer than N syllables.
2. Hiding or compressing list pinyin longer than N syllables, e.g. fēixùshíxìng wèicí → f̄x̀śx̀ẁć.

 

[mikelove]

This is already doable in current builds of 4.0, at least in 'expert mode.'

 

[rizen suha]

request: eliminate tone numbers menu when (built in) zhuyin keyboard is active, since latter already incorporates tone indicators.

 

[mikelove]

Makes sense, but it's actually difficult (no documented API / potentially runs afoul of Apple guidelines) to detect that the built-in Zhuyin keyboard is active.

 

[rizen suha]

i understand. good enuff to offer user switch to disable always. thx!

 

[Weyland]

Have the sequence/order of dictionaries in the Popup definition be fixed. So that it doesn't keep switching between dictionaries.

E.g. my dictionary order is OCC -> PLC -> GF - > XHD -> etc., but sometimes it happens that a certain word only has a definition in the HDC or MOE dictionaries, which consequently causes the next popup to no longer show the OCC dictionary, but rather another (seemingly) random dictionary. It would be nice if the Popup always chose the dictionary with the highest priority.

 

[mikelove]

Turn off “sticky dict selection” in Settings / Popup Definition.

 

[Weyland]

Turn off “sticky dict selection” in Settings / Popup Definition.

Thank you.

That's my fault for looking through that settings page and glancing over the [ Interface ] header, only reading the first item and then dismissing the rest. Awkward

 

[mgoulding97]

I see it's already in the list, but for me the number one feature I would love in pleco is a search counter. Just something in each words pleco entry that says the number of times I've looked at this word's definition. I use pleco to look up words I don't know while reading all the time, and then add my favorite ones to my flashcard deck to study. Seeing which words I've already looked up before, and any I've looked up many times would be super helpful to tell me "add this word to your flashcards!!".

I actually already use a personal workaround to accomplish this. I have created a "looked up" flashcard category, and every time I look up a new word I hit the add to category button. This is for all the words I look up but assume won't be particularly useful to me at the time, so I don't want to add it to my flashcards. But we all know some of these words we assume aren't useful actually end up showing up all the time. The "looked up" category works to help me become aware of these words, but is still inferior to a counter because I need to hit the button each time I look up a word, and because it only tells me that I have looked up the word in the past, but doesn't tell me how many times.

Also: a word frequency rating would be pretty great. I know there are some dictionaries out there that can accomplish this though.

 

[mikelove]

Already implemented for 4.0 - was actually really tricky to do for tapped-on entries, we basically have a whole extra mini flashcard database for 'history words' which gets checked against whenever you tap on one (since it's not necessarily always from the same dictionary).

Frequency: can do that even now with a user dictionary, I don't know if we're likely to find a frequency table we have enough confidence in to publish it officially anytime soon.

 

[Weyland]

Been using the Pleco reader as my ebook reader for a while now and it would be kind of neat if I could have the words I looked up/ added to flashcards be highlighted in the ebook, and when I'm going through my flashcards to have an option to go back to that page if it's still within Pleco's memory/list of documents. Or maybe go a step further and be able to toggle words of a certain flashcard (sub)category to be marked in said text/page.

 

[mikelove]

Already have a feature to highlight words in flashcards in documents.

Highlighting words added from within this specific document would be an interesting idea; we already do have an option to insert a link to the document in the card, wouldn't be too hard to add a feature that extended that in 4.1 or 4.2 or whatever.

 

[Weyland]

Already have a feature to highlight words in flashcards in documents.

Can you include/exclude specific subcategories to this function? I still have beginner flashcards to use with tags. And have categories consisting of words related to like adjectives or idioms. I'd rather not have HSK words from previous levels that I still have lying around be included.

Also, I have been reading a lot these last couple of weeks and a ton of words I have become pretty familiar with. I added them to my flashcard at the beginning, but by now I have learned them. Could there be a button to add score to a flashcard whenever I have it popup in the reader (would be a great addition for getting rid of marked words if you already know them). Or have the score increase by like a tiny fraction if I don't look it up after finishing that specific page.