Rigorous Handwriting Testing in Flashcards

nlucchesi

举人
Flashcards has a handwritten character input option for testing.

But, it doesn't seem very rigorous in making sure that the stroke order is correct.

Are there any options for tightening up the scrutiny on handwritten characters during a flashcard test?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Flashcards has a handwritten character input option for testing.

But, it doesn't seem very rigorous in making sure that the stroke order is correct.

Are there any options for tightening up the scrutiny on handwritten characters during a flashcard test?

No, for that sort of thing we usually steer people to Skritter - we view our handwriting test as more of a visual recall test than as writing practice.
 

Alexis

状元
+1 for Skritter. I use Skritter for learning to read/write characters, and Pleco for everything else. Skritter also has a nice feature to pop-up the current vocab/character in Pleco.
 

小马

Member
No, for that sort of thing we usually steer people to Skritter - we view our handwriting test as more of a visual recall test than as writing practice.

Hi Mike,

I've been using Pleco's full version for almost a year, it's awesome !!
At the same time could it be possible to have an adjustable scrutiny level for the handwriting stroke order? Is the upcoming update going to include such a thing? If not, shall it be considered for future updates or you will still steer people to Skritter?
Pleco offers every conceivable aspect to help us learning Chinese but this. I'd rather use a single application (Pleco) for everything but I still need to practice handwriting with the appropriate stroke order. I guess plenty of other users are in the same situation.

I look forward to hearing back from you.
Many thanks.
Cheers
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
The upcoming update has done very little for flashcards, actually - they're a big enough item that we had to split them off into their own separate update which is what we're going to start work on shortly after we release this one. (after a short break to a) catch breath b) fix bugs and c) port the cross-platform new stuff to Android)

Stroke testing is not currently on our radar for that, though - to be honest, there are a lot of other reasons why people like to use Skritter, and absent a more comprehensive shift to Skritter-like "gamification" I'm not sure how much simply verifying stroke order would really do for us. Certainly something we could do in theory - the company that makes our handwriting recognition library also makes a stroke order testing library, in fact we used the data from that library (but not the testing feature) for our Palm and Windows Mobile stroke order diagrams feature - but there are a lot of other potential new flashcard capabilities we're more excited about. (voice prompts, for example, which have just gotten a lot easier thanks to iOS 7's new text-to-speech APIs)
 
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I couldn’t agree more with the other posts about making writing testing and practice (with stroke order included) available in Pleco. Particularly if the company that makes your handwriting recognition software also makes a stroke order testing library, it would be an extremely useful feature, having it worked into the existing flashcard set up as an optional feature in the already extremely customizable system. It is the only area that pleco doesn’t currently test for, there is great demand for this sort of testing, and certainly could be considered a criteria in determining whether a character or word is mastered. It is certain that a lot of useres including myself would purchase this as an addon to the flashcard module. Most of us are supremely annoyed with subscription services.

As for the testing, the current flashcards already support a mark correct/incorrect and then the optional grading system after correct or incorrect is chosen - remembered perfectly, remembered, barely remembered/ almost remembered, forgotten, and don’t know, which presumably affects the srs function. It needn’t be a complete gamification overhaul at all. While the gaming feel is one aspect of skritter that some people like, other apps have popped up that do away with all of skritters asthetic bells and whistle and simply stick to the functionality of learning the writing because it is indeed useful and there is a demand for it to be available without a subscription.

Two important points- stroke order verification from a visible outline of a character alone is not helpful alone, outside of the initial learning stage. However, testing as to whether a character can be recalled from memory and written accurately with the correct stroke order in a blank square with optional prompts to correct stroke order as you write or a simple assessment at the end of the writinging would be extremely valuable. Also being able to drill the writing of a character repeatedly without advancing to a new card but just erasing and rewriting until the user is comfortable is another function with unending value.
 
other apps have popped up that do away with all of skritters asthetic bells and whistle and simply stick to the functionality of learning the writing because it is indeed useful and there is a demand for it to be available without a subscription.
Hello Akpierce1776,
Could you please tell us what those other apps are? Thank you.
 
I can’t remember the names of the ones I didn’t care for as much but I found TofuLearn and came to like it enough to use it regularly and while it has some shortcomings, I find it to be fantastic and I am amazed that there is no charge.

If I come across the names of the other ones I’ll post them later. If you liked skritter though and could do without all the asthetics and the gamey feel I think tofulearn is a fantastic alternative.

I would be in chinese learning heaven if Pleco added this sort of writing testing to their amazing flashcard system, which I definitely don’t use enough mainly because it lacks this capability. I never really focused on writing in all my studies so while I can read and speak about 2,000 - 3,000 words, I can’t write from memory more than a couple hundred of that and I would make errors in more than a few of those. While I can easily use a computer’s pinyin input to type at length, by hand, I could barely put together a full paragraph without a reference page to see the characters or a dictionary. It’s extremely frustrating and I wish I had been more diligent with writing from scratch in the beginning and learning the characters to that extent.

I may very well be missing some workarounds in pleco that would let me test for that sort of mastery of a character in a different way. If so, I would love to hear any brainstorm ideas for doing it that might work. Pleco is just so versatile and complete, I would love to stay within the app for this as well.
 
Still relating to handwriting, does anyone know if there is a way to change all the characters in pleco to the font FZyingbikaishu? I am able to change the settings in the reader to display text in this font which looks like handwriting and is very helpful to me. Seeing the characters like this throughout the app would be very helpful to my handwriting endeavors.
 

pdwalker

状元
Akpierce,

last summer, i abandoned all my existing cards and redid them as written tests, so that i could write every character i learned to read and speak.

i find pleco more than suitable for this. generally i find that after a while, you’ll automatically learn the right stroke order. for those few characters i get wrong, i can immediately pull up the stroke chart for the character, learn it and move on.

i’d say, don’t worry about it so much.
 
Akpierce,

last summer, i abandoned all my existing cards and redid them as written tests,

Thanks for the suggestion. When you say you redid them as written tests, do you mean you selected a specific written test setting in the flashcards and redid them or you just used the card as you normally would but answering with a pen and paper?
 
Hello Akpierce1776,
Could you please tell us what those other apps are? Thank you.

https://www.alllanguageresources.com/best-apps-learn-chinese/

I found several interesting ones in this list. But I stuck with Tofulearn for the skritter like function. Ultimately though I think I’ll be starting the user created shared deck Contextual Sentences here in Pleco and the 字 feature in the toolbar during the flashcard session to write the character to test myself and then repeat as needed to learn correctly and just leaving the session briefly to look up any stroke order I am not familiar with.

Tofulearn is definitely the best skritter like function that’s available for free in my opinion.
 

pdwalker

状元
Thanks for the suggestion. When you say you redid them as written tests, do you mean you selected a specific written test setting in the flashcards and redid them or you just used the card as you normally would but answering with a pen and paper?

New scorefile, new written test, same card categories - all tested using pleco.
 
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