What about a "tester"?

[Mads]

Many people studying chinese often ask themselves and others how many characters they think they know.

I was thinking, with the new custom flascard function, that there might be an easy way to get a pretty accurate number using plecodict.

If it would be possible somehow to get a frequency list of characters and a license to use it, and then, for example, divide it into groups of 500/1000/2000 etc. most used.

This way you could, depending on your level, choose a number and try out about 100 characters ( the more you test with the more accurate naturally ) then depending on you percentage calculate how many characters you know.

I'm not a mathematician, so I'm not sure if this would be a reliable way to test. Just an idea.

 

[mikelove]

We actually had a plan for this way back in version 1 - we just never got around to implementing it. It seemed like a lot of work for a feature people wouldn't use very often. But I suppose it's really not all that difficult to do... we wouldn't even need a frequency list (though they're easy to find), in fact statistically as long as the sample of characters we tested was large enough I think we could be pretty accurate testing randomly-selected characters from the entire database (though we probably would want to adjust it for different skill levels). In fact Clavis Sinica (http://www.clavisinica.com/) already offers a feature like this.

So I'm not sure if this will make it into PlecoDict 1.0 but it certainly seems like a feature we could add eventually, perhaps paired with some of the other character-related enhancements we're working on for 2.0 (stroke order diagrams etc).