annoying writing practice

tajlarson

Member
I've been having an issue with practicing writing. It seems if I want to review writing a character/stroke order I need to jump all over the place.for example, if I go to practice I can see the character flashcard, then if I want to see the stroke order I need to tap on the character, exit the practice, go to stoke order, play the stroke order, watch it, then if I want to write it to test my understanding I need to either write it on paper then re watch it, check to make sure I've done it correctly, go AOL the way back then go to the next flashcard all over.
Is there any way I can simplify this as its quite annoying... To be honest I'd just like an option to try tracing the character, then have it tell me if the order was right or wrong, and if it was wrong to play the correct order and let me retry. Also is there a way I can do the fill in the blanks add a practice rather than always having to do it as a test? :!:
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
tajlarson said:
Is there any way I can simplify this as its quite annoying... To be honest I'd just like an option to try tracing the character, then have it tell me if the order was right or wrong, and if it was wrong to play the correct order and let me retry. Also is there a way I can do the fill in the blanks add a practice rather than always having to do it as a test? :!:

How about doing a stroke order test, not actually tapping anything, then having it play the correct order for you and tapping on the pen button to bring up the sketch box to practice it? Saves a few steps anyway.

With fill in the blanks, if you set the scoring system in the "Scoring" configuration screen to "none" that will effectively turn anything into a practice test.
 

tajlarson

Member
Sorry for the double posts. Figured I'd paste the answers here and you could delete the other post.

mikelove said:
tajlarson said:
I just got the pro bundle and have been having some issues. first is that I was hoping for a practice option/test option where I could write the character and it would check my order, not just tap parts of the character.

We're looking into adding that, but to be honest we haven't had that many requests for it - people don't seem to be practicing writing as much as they used to. Nonetheless it'll probably happen in some form within the next year or so.

tajlarson said:
also I was wondering if there was a way where I could make flashcards where it would show the character quite large in the center of the screen which i could trace,similar to the character search screen?

Tracing would be tricky, but you can put an overlay over any flashcard by tapping on the pen button at the top right corner of the screen, so if you pick a big font size you could do some writing drills that way.

tajlarson said:
I got this under recommendation from friends but without any manual or direction it just seems like an over priced dictionary. I also have hand made flash cards and I thought this would be a good way to get rid if them but have not found

There's a detailed manual at pleco.com/anmanual which includes a flashcard tutorial. There are a whole lot of other features, we just don't happen to have made this particular type of flashcard test yet.

As for the writing test, will that just be an update or will that be an additional thing we'll need to purchase (also, about when this year as I'd really like to get into studying writing and I think it would really help a lot). Also I've done what you've tried, pressing the pen button on the stroke order test but the writing area is completely blank, is there a way to keep the character on screen for reference?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
tajlarson said:
Sorry for the double posts. Figured I'd paste the answers here and you could delete the other post.

Thanks - I cleaned up the quotes a bit for you.

tajlarson said:
As for the writing test, will that just be an update or will that be an additional thing we'll need to purchase (also, about when this year as I'd really like to get into studying writing and I think it would really help a lot).

It'll be an additional add-on since they'll probably be royalties involved, but I think it's probably something that we'd give to people who'd bought bundles recently for free. The "about when" question is tricky because of the licensing aspect of it - we're talking to a couple of companies in China, but there'd be some customization work involved on their end that's hard to pin down exactly.

tajlarson said:
Also I've done what you've tried, pressing the pen button on the stroke order test but the writing area is completely blank, is there a way to keep the character on screen for reference?

Looks like a bug - we'll try to get this fixed for 2.3.8, sorry about that.
 

tajlarson

Member
Ok, so now I've come to another wall with this. I've just downloaded your "Chinese with Mike" flashcard set, which I thought would be really useful as I was browsing them but when I went to test the stroke order with the "useful basic words" only one card shows up (Zai), seemingly because it's a single character word. They work with everything else except stroke order. Again I'm really trying to love this software, I can see a lot of potential, but when I'm trying to learn writing, as far as this app goes I've run into so many issues with it lately that I'd probably be better off buying flashcards that show the stroke order and writing them out on paper. It has some neat features, such as the ocr etc., but I've spent more time trying to learn how to use the thing than I have learning Chinese so it's seems like more than just a quick waste of $80.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
tajlarson said:
Ok, so now I've come to another wall with this. I've just downloaded your "Chinese with Mike" flashcard set, which I thought would be really useful as I was browsing them but when I went to test the stroke order with the "useful basic words" only one card shows up (Zai), seemingly because it's a single character word. They work with everything else except stroke order. Again I'm really trying to love this software, I can see a lot of potential, but when I'm trying to learn writing, as far as this app goes I've run into so many issues with it lately that I'd probably be better off buying flashcards that show the stroke order and writing them out on paper. It has some neat features, such as the ocr etc., but I've spent more time trying to learn how to use the thing than I have learning Chinese so it's seems like more than just a quick waste of $80.

Stroke order tests only work for single-character cards, basically because we don't want you to end up needlessly reviewing common characters over and over again. We're considering adding a command to automatically generate single-character cards for any characters in your multi-character cards that don't already have them, but we haven't done that yet.

Again, though, this is one of the least developed parts of our software and it's really not something we'd recommend buying Pleco for; if you're looking specifically for something you can use to practice stroke order diagrams then you'd probably be better off with another tool. The main focus of our flashcard system is on vocabulary learning rather than stroke order, and it's much better designed for that. So if you'd like to cancel / refund your Pleco purchase then send us an email and we'll be happy to set that up.
 
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