Dialogue flashcards - sentences instead of words

Very easy for me to put words into Plecos flashcard system, but what about for dialogue - like a sentence?

For ex, is it possible to take a sentence from Chinesepod that I studied and turn it into a flashcard? Is the answer to just custom create a card?
 

Shun

状元
Hi Jordan,

absolutely, that's possible. Either you tap them in as a new custom flashcard on the smartphone, or you prepare a tab-delimited list of the Hanzi, pinyin, and the English translations which you can then import. You may also leave out the pinyin because Pleco can derive it from the Hanzi, but that process isn't quite error-free because computers can't yet know for certain how to segment the words.

The import process is described here:

http://android.pleco.com/manual/310/flash.html#importexportfileformat

and here:

http://android.pleco.com/manual/310/flash.html#import

Hope this helps,

Shun
 
you prepare a tab-delimited list of the Hanzi, pinyin, and the English translations which you can then import. You may also leave out the pinyin because Pleco can derive it from the Hanzi, but that process isn't quite error-free because computers can't yet know for certain how to segment the words.
Hi Jordan,

absolutely, that's possible. Either you tap them in as a new custom flashcard on the smartphone, or you prepare a tab-delimited list of the Hanzi, pinyin, and the English translations which you can then import. You may also leave out the pinyin because Pleco can derive it from the Hanzi, but that process isn't quite error-free because computers can't yet know for certain how to segment the words.

The import process is described here:

http://android.pleco.com/manual/310/flash.html#importexportfileformat

and here:

http://android.pleco.com/manual/310/flash.html#import

Hope this helps,

Shun
Hi Jordan,

absolutely, that's possible. Either you tap them in as a new custom flashcard on the smartphone, or you prepare a tab-delimited list of the Hanzi, pinyin, and the English translations which you can then import. You may also leave out the pinyin because Pleco can derive it from the Hanzi, but that process isn't quite error-free because computers can't yet know for certain how to segment the words.

The import process is described here:

http://android.pleco.com/manual/310/flash.html#importexportfileformat

and here:

http://android.pleco.com/manual/310/flash.html#import

Hope this helps,

Shun
I'm still not clear on where or how to go about typing this information. Is it in a word doc, or do I type it on some other software or some specific app and save it before I can follow the steps of importing? I'm not tech savy, and I'm sorry if that was already explained in the links you posted, but I didn't see it.

Thank you, Shun!
 

Shun

状元
Yeah, a certain small degree of tech savvy will be required. It isn't a Word document, but plain text.

I still suggest you try to read through these parts of the manual at some point, which really aren't hard to understand, especially if you consult Google from time to time, but I will briefly outline the process below, so other beginners can benefit, as well:

I recommend the following procedure:
  1. You open a new, empty spreadsheet on your Mac/PC. (Excel, Numbers or perhaps LibreOffice Calc)
  2. In the first cell at the top left, you type "// <<name of your flashcard list>>". (with the name your flashcard list should have, without the "<<" and ">>")
  3. In the cell below it, you enter the first Chinese sentence. (setting your Mac’s/PC‘s input mode to Simplified or Traditional Chinese)
  4. In the cell to its right, you enter the pinyin pronunciation of the Chinese sentence on the same line. You need to be aware of the pinyin format used. It's the syllable without the tone, immediately followed by the tone number and then a space where a new word starts.
  5. In the cell to its right (in the third column), you enter the sentence's translation in your language.
So you enter all your sentences like this (don't forget to Save along the way so you don't lose your work), and when you're done, you can select the three columns and choose Copy to copy the sentences into the clipboard. There, they should automatically have the tab-delimited format that is required by Pleco's importer. Next, you open a text editor like BBEdit, Notepad, Notepad++ (just google for it) and paste in the data. One last thing you need to do is remove two tabs after the first line that starts with "//", because they aren't needed there.

Then, you save the text file and email it to yourself, open the email and save the attachment on your Android smartphone to your Downloads directory, for example. You open Pleco, choose Import/Export from the sidebar, then select the file you just saved, and start the import. Then the flashcards will end up in a category named by your "// <<name of your flashcard list>>" line in the text file.

For all the rest, I recommend that you read through the whole, not so long manual with the help of Google. Your effort will be rewarded.
 
I tried to create my own "dialogue flashcards" without adding pinyin to the file expecting that Pleco would create the missing pinyin automatically, but it didn't happen. So after importing the text file, the flashcards were created only with hanzi and translation.
The file was like this:
//Sentences
我喜欢学习中文[tab][tab]I like to study Chinese.

I tried like this as well:
//Sentences
我喜欢学习中文[tab]I like to study Chinese.

But it didn't work either.
 

Shun

状元
Hello ViniciusRJP,

that's an easy one: You need to have the option "Fill in missing fields" enabled while importing. See the following screenshot of the resulting flashcard:

IMG_5047.PNGIMG_5046.PNG

Hope this helps,

Shun
 
Hi, I also decided to create phrase flashcards. No issue with the import or the auto addition of pinyin. However, when reviewing the card, upon tapping a character I only get the character translation, instead of automatically selecting the word (ie several characters). Is there a way to fix that? Maybe a setting during the import step? Thanks!
 

Shun

状元
Hi Pierre,

welcome to the (sentence flashcards) club. I can't really answer this question fully, except to point you to two posts by @mikelove which touch on the topic:


All I know is that the current behavior is deliberate, but it may change with a future version of Pleco.

Hope this helps,

Shun
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Hi, I also decided to create phrase flashcards. No issue with the import or the auto addition of pinyin. However, when reviewing the card, upon tapping a character I only get the character translation, instead of automatically selecting the word (ie several characters). Is there a way to fix that? Maybe a setting during the import step? Thanks!

No way to fix this at the moment, I'm afraid - it's built into how the reader works in the flashcard screen.
 
Thanks for your answers, actually I found a way around that is ok for me: I copied the chinese characters again at the end of the translation. The words are recognised in the revealed part of the card (a bit like how the dictionary behaves). With your suggestion of using Python, it is very quick to make a batch modification (cf attached script).

@Shun, I saw you had several exchanges about sets of sentence cards, but I couldn't find if you proposed sets sorted by HSK level. Do you know if there is one?
 

Attachments

  • Flashcard_chinese_to_definition.txt
    1.3 KB · Views: 204

Shun

状元
Hi Pierre,

thanks; there are. Would you like to create HSK rated sentence flashcards for the Chinese-French language pair? Currently, I only have Chinese-English. (see the "Flashcard Exchange" section) I suggest that you give my Python HSK rating scripts a try—they already work quite well—and maybe even improve on them. If you wish to do it:

I attach a Python file with the core of the functionality (you'll need to remove the additional ".txt" suffix). The "hsk new.txt" file contains the HSK vocabulary list that came with Pleco, it helps the script to rate the difficulties of the words in the sentences. For the BCC corpus frequency list, I can send you a link as a private message. You have to read through the code, which should be quite easy to follow, and add a "main" function to get it to run.

If you need further guidance from me, do check back.

Cheers, Shun
 

Attachments

  • Fold_rate_match_in_separated_functions.py.txt
    18.2 KB · Views: 195
  • hsk new.txt
    33.4 KB · Views: 197
Last edited:
Hi @Shun, thanks a lot for the files. I began looking at the code but it will take me some more time. I'm sure I'll have plenty of questions, I'll PM you since it is not directly 'Pleco' related.
 

Shun

状元
Hi Pierre, you're welcome, feel free to. It would be very nice to have even more Pleco "modder" programmers (a term once coined by Mike) for all users' benefit.
 
Last edited:
Top