A friend and I have recently decided to learn how to handwrite Chinese characters, and are planning to do so by studying 10 of the top 3000 most common characters everyday over the course of the year.
As a huge fan of Pleco's flashcard system I was hoping to make use of it's SRS features to assist in this endeavor, but ran into an issue that has me a bit stumped.
Ideally, every day I want the flashcard system to first show me the 10 new cards/characters I need to learn for that day, followed by any remaining cards for me to review from previous days based on their spaced repetition intervals. Crucially, I want my friend's phone to also show them the same 10 new cards/characters as me for that day, but their remaining cards can of course differ from mine based on how their spaced repetition is going and what cards they need to review.
To enable this my friend and I imported an identical flashcard set of the 3000 most common characters and then, amongst other settings, on both of our devices (my iPad and their iPhone) have Card Selection set to Study new cards first, where we then Limit new cards > By "new per day > Count "10" > Prioritize by "oldest". The issue that then arises is twofold:
1. The 10 new cards/characters it shows us on a given day not are not quite in the same order as the flashcards themselves. It's very close, but usually a few are out of order.
2. My friend and I do not see the same 10 new cards as each other on a given day. Most of the the 10 new cards are the same for both of us, but one or two are usually different.
Note that Sort cards randomly and Sort not-due randomly are both off, so I do not believe that this is happening because I have accidentally enabled a setting which is sorting the cards randomly -- especially because the 10 new cards we seen on a given day are almost identical to each other, just one or two being different.
We are using the exact same flashcard set, and even tried importing together at the exact same time (after freshly erasing our flashcard databases), but we still couldn't quite get them to line up. I imagine this has to do with the Created date for all of the cards being practically identical, since they were imported all at once, causing Prioritize by "oldest" to act a bit inconsistently.
One workaround that seems effective is to increase the priority of the 10 cards we want to review on a particular day to very high, decreasing the priority after we initially review them and then repeating for the next 10 cards the next day. This is a bit tedious, so I'm not sure if it's a feasible solution for us in the longterm.
Ideally, I would love to be able to edit the creation time of flashcards, or prioritize new cards by a different value (such as their order in our flashcard databases) such that there is a guaranteed order of new cards regardless of device. I have a background in Computer Science so I would gladly cook up a script to order the cards automatically if there's a way for me to actually edit their creation times perhaps by directly editing a Pleco database file and reimporting it -- though I'm not sure if that's actually feasible? I've also been experimenting with Pleco 4.0, but am not yet familiar enough with it's expert test settings to know how to achieve this there.
Any hints for what I could do to guarantee the order in which new cards appear in a spaced-repitition flashcard test would would be greatly appreciated!
Cheers,
博思
As a huge fan of Pleco's flashcard system I was hoping to make use of it's SRS features to assist in this endeavor, but ran into an issue that has me a bit stumped.
Ideally, every day I want the flashcard system to first show me the 10 new cards/characters I need to learn for that day, followed by any remaining cards for me to review from previous days based on their spaced repetition intervals. Crucially, I want my friend's phone to also show them the same 10 new cards/characters as me for that day, but their remaining cards can of course differ from mine based on how their spaced repetition is going and what cards they need to review.
To enable this my friend and I imported an identical flashcard set of the 3000 most common characters and then, amongst other settings, on both of our devices (my iPad and their iPhone) have Card Selection set to Study new cards first, where we then Limit new cards > By "new per day > Count "10" > Prioritize by "oldest". The issue that then arises is twofold:
1. The 10 new cards/characters it shows us on a given day not are not quite in the same order as the flashcards themselves. It's very close, but usually a few are out of order.
2. My friend and I do not see the same 10 new cards as each other on a given day. Most of the the 10 new cards are the same for both of us, but one or two are usually different.
Note that Sort cards randomly and Sort not-due randomly are both off, so I do not believe that this is happening because I have accidentally enabled a setting which is sorting the cards randomly -- especially because the 10 new cards we seen on a given day are almost identical to each other, just one or two being different.
We are using the exact same flashcard set, and even tried importing together at the exact same time (after freshly erasing our flashcard databases), but we still couldn't quite get them to line up. I imagine this has to do with the Created date for all of the cards being practically identical, since they were imported all at once, causing Prioritize by "oldest" to act a bit inconsistently.
One workaround that seems effective is to increase the priority of the 10 cards we want to review on a particular day to very high, decreasing the priority after we initially review them and then repeating for the next 10 cards the next day. This is a bit tedious, so I'm not sure if it's a feasible solution for us in the longterm.
Ideally, I would love to be able to edit the creation time of flashcards, or prioritize new cards by a different value (such as their order in our flashcard databases) such that there is a guaranteed order of new cards regardless of device. I have a background in Computer Science so I would gladly cook up a script to order the cards automatically if there's a way for me to actually edit their creation times perhaps by directly editing a Pleco database file and reimporting it -- though I'm not sure if that's actually feasible? I've also been experimenting with Pleco 4.0, but am not yet familiar enough with it's expert test settings to know how to achieve this there.
Any hints for what I could do to guarantee the order in which new cards appear in a spaced-repitition flashcard test would would be greatly appreciated!
Cheers,
博思
