Exploring dictionary from flashcards

I've started using PlecoDict in the last couple of weeks and am very impressed with the functionality and quality. The ability to look up words in two dictionaries and then add them to my flashcard stack with the press of a button is revolutionizing my study process, and has inspired me to take a crack at reading the Hong Lou Meng.

There is one feature I think would be a huge improvement: the ability to browse the dictionaries from a flashcard session. What I tend to do is mark all the words I want to learn by putting them in a flashcard stack, then I go through the stack to memorize them. As part of my memorization process I like to explore the meanings of the individual characters in binomes or chengyus, and look for other words that a character appears in. It's possible to do this by quiting out of a flashcard session but it's very inconvenient.

A related improvement would be the incorporation of the Zhongwen etymological dictionary. This is a fantastic aide for memorizing characters and learning to differentiate similar ones.

Thanks,

Dan Norcross

Actually this is already on the (very long!) 2.0 feature list - the basic plan is to let you pull a list of flashcards up in the Entry List just like a list of dictionary results. Like a lot of interface-related 2.0 features it's still not certain whether it will make it into the finished version, but we're thinking about it at least

The Zhongwen dictionary is less likely, I'm afraid - we haven't actually approached Rick Harbaugh about licensing it yet, but we've already shelled out an awful lot of money for 2.0-related licenses (about twice what we thought we would have to) and we really don't want to commit any more money to them until we actually have 2.0 out and money coming in from it. I'm not sure if he'd be interested anyway, since our software is at least an indirect competitor to his website; we've contacted some other authors of online dictionaries and they've consistently refused to even discuss a licensing arrangement.

Going forward, I think we're going to have to develop a lot more content on our own; in the last year or so the licensing environment for Chinese-related learning material has gotten downright hostile, people that used to be friendly and open about licensing are now making ridiculous royalty demands or insisting on all sorts of absurd anti-competitive contract clauses. Most of the licenses we hold now are on pretty firm footing, but it's getting harder and harder to bring in new ones.

people that used to be friendly and open about licensing are now making ridiculous royalty demands or insisting on all sorts of absurd anti-competitive contract clauses

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I guess that's because Chinese has gotten more popular?

By the way, the ability to search for all characters that include the current as a component (a la Wenlin) would be a nice feature. Probably not that easy to implement, though.

Something like that, yes. Either that or they've now decided that we're a big enough "threat" that they can't be as nice to us as they used to be.

Component-based search would be nice, it's been off-again/on-again on the 2.0 feature list and is currently off since the stroke order data we just licensed does not include component info (as some stroke order databases do). Might be a good thing for 2.1, actually, it wouldn't be all that difficult to assemble the data (maybe 30 seconds per character to tag it with its non-radical components) and the programming end of it would be almost trivial.

actually, it wouldn't be all that difficult to assemble the data (maybe 30 seconds per character to tag it with its non-radical components)

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I see. You can automate the process?

Not completely, but we can make the data entry interface very streamlined since there are so few possible component choices. And since we already know one component (the radical) for each character, in many cases we'll only need to find / input one other component.