Audio flashcards

[dphalp]

How many audio flashcards can be created from the dictionaries in the Basic/Professional bundles?

I'd like to look up a word in English, then add it as a card which would include audio even if it was a multi-character word. Does this work automatically for most dictionary entries if the Extended Audio add-on is installed?

Are there more Audio flashcards that can be created from the Professional bundle than the Basic one?

Thanks,

Daniel

 

[mikelove]

How many audio flashcards can be created from the dictionaries in the Basic/Professional bundles?

I'd like to look up a word in English, then add it as a card which would include audio even if it was a multi-character word. Does this work automatically for most dictionary entries if the Extended Audio add-on is installed?

Are there more Audio flashcards that can be created from the Professional bundle than the Basic one?

The extended audio files include multi-syllable recordings for about 34,000 words. However, by default, even when the system can't find a recording in the extended audio files it stitches one together out of single-syllable recordings, so you can theoretically get some sort of audio for any C-E dictionary entry. The PLC dictionary has a bit under 80,000 words, and the free CC-CEDICT add-on around 100,000 (though much of that is overlap, of course), so there are a lot of words that don't have multi-syllable recordings even in the Basic bundle, but most common words are covered by our recordings at least.

The extended audio database is exactly the same in the Basic and Professional bundles, so the only reason you'd be able to create more audio flashcards in Professional than in Basic would be because Professional had an entry for a word that Basic didn't - most of the words for which we have multi-syllable recordings should be covered by the Basic bundle dictionaries, though.

 

[dphalp]

Thanks Mike. I've used this for about a year and being able to instantly have an audio flashcard for any word I encounter has been great for my vocabulary.

Are there any full sentence audio flashcards for Pleco or is there any way I can provide my own audio for flashcards? I'd like to use cards to improve my sentence skills but the audio generated from individual syllables doesn't have the same flow as a native speaker.

Regards,

Daniel

 

[mikelove]

Thanks Mike. I've used this for about a year and being able to instantly have an audio flashcard for any word I encounter has been great for my vocabulary.

Are there any full sentence audio flashcards for Pleco or is there any way I can provide my own audio for flashcards? I'd like to use cards to improve my sentence skills but the audio generated from individual syllables doesn't have the same flow as a native speaker.

Not yet, but we've recently licensed a text-to-speech system that should do a much better job of rendering these (which we plan to offer as a paid add-on in a future release, but with a hefty discount for existing Audio Pronunciation module owners), and on top of that we're also planning to add support for custom audio recordings in flashcards in a future release (still trying to sort out some of the data storage issues).

 

[matai]

Dear Mike

I am a mandarin teacher and we use the program anki extensively at school to help our students remember all of the vocab they are expected to know. The format we have found that works best for the flashcards is having audio only for the top side in the form of "word, example sentence, word again" And on the other side having the Chinese character, pinyin and English. i.e.

Side 1: (voice saying)

“爸爸， 我爸爸今年四十五岁， 爸爸”

Side 2: (text displaying)

爸爸
bàba
father

Anki is helpful in that the pinyin toolkit automatically fills in most of the fields. It also gives us a lot of flexibility about how the fields are displayed. However we have to record all of the audio ourselves, which is the time consuming part. I was wondering if pleco's new text-to-speech system will allow the automatic creation of flashcards such as the ones detailed above. We want to start preparing our kids for the new HSK, however the thought of having to go through and do another 6000 recordings is a bit daunting.

Also I was wondering if it would be possible to add an RSS feed to the document reader. I subscribe to Chinese news feeds a lot and it would be handy if the RSS feed could be displayed straight away in the reader as opposed to having to copy and paste it all the time.

Anyway thanks for making such a great product and actually listening to the people who use it!

Matthew

 

[mikelove]

Anki is helpful in that the pinyin toolkit automatically fills in most of the fields. It also gives us a lot of flexibility about how the fields are displayed. However we have to record all of the audio ourselves, which is the time consuming part. I was wondering if pleco's new text-to-speech system will allow the automatic creation of flashcards such as the ones detailed above. We want to start preparing our kids for the new HSK, however the thought of having to go through and do another 6000 recordings is a bit daunting.

It should, yes you actually won't even need to automatically create the audio, it can generate it on-the-fly each time (so you don't have hundreds of MB of storage space being eaten up by all of those recordings). The main question is how we'd support playing examples like this - we'd almost want a way to define a custom field for that, which is something we've been looking at but our plans for that are much more tentative at the moment. However, at the very least you could probably create a card with those characters as the "headword" and the word / pinyin / definition as the "definition" and play it that way.

Also I was wondering if it would be possible to add an RSS feed to the document reader. I subscribe to Chinese news feeds a lot and it would be handy if the RSS feed could be displayed straight away in the reader as opposed to having to copy and paste it all the time.

We've been looking for a good open-source RSS library we can use, but we haven't had much luck yet - most of them are covered by licenses that would preclude our using them.

 

[matai]

Mike

Thanks for the reply. I guess one way would be like you said to define a few custom fields for the audio options i.e.

[audio: definition]
[audio: example sentence]
[audio: measure word]

That way the reading could be generated with something like:

[audio: definition][audio: example sentence][audio: definition]

Then all you would have to do would be to go through and tag an entire dictionary . "A Chinese-English Dictionary" looks like it would be a good candidate.

Matthew

 

[mikelove]

Mike

Thanks for the reply. I guess one way would be like you said to define a few custom fields for the audio options i.e.

[audio: definition]
[audio: example sentence]
[audio: measure word]

That way the reading could be generated with something like:

[audio: definition][audio: example sentence][audio: definition]

Then all you would have to do would be to go through and tag an entire dictionary . "A Chinese-English Dictionary" looks like it would be a good candidate.

Basically we need support for custom fields and for custom arrangements of what audio plays (and when) - both things we're already interested in and both things that create a lot of other possibilities. (we've licensed an English TTS engine too...)