English to Chinese flashcards
- Thread starter caesartg
- Start date
Speeding up character entry through prediction
When using the 'Handwriting Input' tool, how about 'following character prediction' - you know, like the Microsoft IME, CJKOS and HandDragon all have whereby if you enter a character, you are presented with the list of most frequent partners to that character. This would greatly speedup word entry and could be tied to the Oxford or ABC lexicons in order to avoid attempting to look up a non-existent entry. I know that PlecoDict isn't an IME but it would be useful. Failing that, how about when a character is written, having an option where it waits for a second, third, fourth... character to be written before returning to the main screen (rather than having to select the 'Handwriting Input' icon multiple times)?
All the best
Ben Caesar
When using the 'Handwriting Input' tool, how about 'following character prediction' - you know, like the Microsoft IME, CJKOS and HandDragon all have whereby if you enter a character, you are presented with the list of most frequent partners to that character. This would greatly speedup word entry and could be tied to the Oxford or ABC lexicons in order to avoid attempting to look up a non-existent entry. I know that PlecoDict isn't an IME but it would be useful. Failing that, how about when a character is written, having an option where it waits for a second, third, fourth... character to be written before returning to the main screen (rather than having to select the 'Handwriting Input' icon multiple times)?
All the best
Ben Caesar
Flashcard sessions
Would it be possible you could add functionality to keep a flashcard session open, but go back to the main dictionary screen and then quickly return to the flashcard session when finished checking up on something?
The reason why - when I go through a set of new characters/compounds the first few times, I always check up on such things as the components of a difficult character, the usage of a compound, other compounds a character I'm flashcarding appears in, or even just browsing the dictionary entry the flashcard pulls up to get the readings of unknown words in the examples - part of my initial attempts at deep learning a character or compound.
Before installing Plecodict, I combined Anki (a flashcard product [don't worry, Plecodict's Chinese-specific FC functionality is far superior!]) with ZDic/Kdic dictionary apps for flashcard studying. I just zipped between both programs to do my deep initial study.
Hope you understand what I'm asking. I feel it would be very useful as I currently end up quitting flashcard sessions dozens of times when I'm learning new vocab and characters and it feels a bit disjointed studying this way.
Cheers
Ben Caesar
Would it be possible you could add functionality to keep a flashcard session open, but go back to the main dictionary screen and then quickly return to the flashcard session when finished checking up on something?
The reason why - when I go through a set of new characters/compounds the first few times, I always check up on such things as the components of a difficult character, the usage of a compound, other compounds a character I'm flashcarding appears in, or even just browsing the dictionary entry the flashcard pulls up to get the readings of unknown words in the examples - part of my initial attempts at deep learning a character or compound.
Before installing Plecodict, I combined Anki (a flashcard product [don't worry, Plecodict's Chinese-specific FC functionality is far superior!]) with ZDic/Kdic dictionary apps for flashcard studying. I just zipped between both programs to do my deep initial study.
Hope you understand what I'm asking. I feel it would be very useful as I currently end up quitting flashcard sessions dozens of times when I'm learning new vocab and characters and it feels a bit disjointed studying this way.
Cheers
Ben Caesar
Complexity and usability
I was just reading other users' comments about the flashcard system and your replies concerning the complexity of it and, seeing as the original thread had diverged since, I've just started a new one.
I think that it's admirable that you have decided to layer the complexity of the usability as you have done - it allows beginners to take up the app, do all the basics and then learn about ranking, flags, rules and so on, as their experience builds and they see why they might want to use such things - a difficult balancing act. As a result, Plecodict is probably the most flexible app I've ever seen on the Palm and it has made me think more about how I study by introducing new methods.
Cheers for that!
Ben Caesar
I was just reading other users' comments about the flashcard system and your replies concerning the complexity of it and, seeing as the original thread had diverged since, I've just started a new one.
I think that it's admirable that you have decided to layer the complexity of the usability as you have done - it allows beginners to take up the app, do all the basics and then learn about ranking, flags, rules and so on, as their experience builds and they see why they might want to use such things - a difficult balancing act. As a result, Plecodict is probably the most flexible app I've ever seen on the Palm and it has made me think more about how I study by introducing new methods.
Cheers for that!
Ben Caesar
Setting flags
I have 3 flags for whether I can read, understand and write a character.
Would you consider making it quicker to set flags while moving through flashcards (E.g. A set of checkboxes perhaps with some tiny identifier the user can set up - a small icon or something, so as to conserve space - most users would probably use at most 3 or 4 flags). Otherwise, the only way I can do this is by first testing myself on the card, revealing it, coming to a conclusion about whether to set a flag (if I can remember it's settings - otherwise I need to take a look first using 'I'!), pressing the 'I' button (Edit card), clicking the 'Flags' pull-down, checking the flag values and setting one, then clicking 'done' to return to my flashcard session. Maybe there's a faster way of doing it I'm ignorant of. Otherwise, it would certainly bring the whole flags issue to life for me as, after using other another flashcard app that only has one flag, I've always felt limited by it.
My apologies for posting so many items at once!
Ben Caesar
I have 3 flags for whether I can read, understand and write a character.
Would you consider making it quicker to set flags while moving through flashcards (E.g. A set of checkboxes perhaps with some tiny identifier the user can set up - a small icon or something, so as to conserve space - most users would probably use at most 3 or 4 flags). Otherwise, the only way I can do this is by first testing myself on the card, revealing it, coming to a conclusion about whether to set a flag (if I can remember it's settings - otherwise I need to take a look first using 'I'!), pressing the 'I' button (Edit card), clicking the 'Flags' pull-down, checking the flag values and setting one, then clicking 'done' to return to my flashcard session. Maybe there's a faster way of doing it I'm ignorant of. Otherwise, it would certainly bring the whole flags issue to life for me as, after using other another flashcard app that only has one flag, I've always felt limited by it.
My apologies for posting so many items at once!
Ben Caesar
I merged all of these into one topic to make things a bit more manageable - no big deal, but usually it's best to create as few new topics as possible to make it easier for people to read all of your suggestions without having to go through half a dozen different links.
I've already covered a lot of this by e-mail, but just to put it out here:
English-to-Chinese flashcards have been requested by quite a few people and are definitely something we're thinking about for 2.0. Though there might not be very many testing options available for them, since our main focus will remain Chinese-to-English.
Character prediction isn't necessarily all that useful when you're looking up words in a dictionary (since often you'll be looking for one of the least common words that starts with that character), but I agree that embedding a mini Input Field into the handwriting input screen would streamline things. Though you can already get a lot of this functionality with the fullscreen handwriting input mode.
Wordnet seems to be stored in a less-than-straightforward format, but if we have time we'll certainly consider releasing a free English-English database. Though anyone who wanted to this could do it right now with MakePlecoDict.
We've actually gotten a lot of requests for the ability to suspend / put on hold a flashcard session and return to it later; particularly important on Palm where you can only run one application at a time. So this is another thing on our 2.0 feature list.
Thanks for the kind words on the flashcard system - we're definitely planning to do more with layered complexity in the next version, ideally we'd like to have something more like SuperMemo where you can get a lot of the benefits of the more advanced features without having to actually understand how they work.
And you can already make it easy to reconfigure flags if you just choose "Flag List" in the "Extra info" menu in Test Settings - that will let you change the flags right from the main screen.
Thanks for all the great feedback!
I've already covered a lot of this by e-mail, but just to put it out here:
English-to-Chinese flashcards have been requested by quite a few people and are definitely something we're thinking about for 2.0. Though there might not be very many testing options available for them, since our main focus will remain Chinese-to-English.
Character prediction isn't necessarily all that useful when you're looking up words in a dictionary (since often you'll be looking for one of the least common words that starts with that character), but I agree that embedding a mini Input Field into the handwriting input screen would streamline things. Though you can already get a lot of this functionality with the fullscreen handwriting input mode.
Wordnet seems to be stored in a less-than-straightforward format, but if we have time we'll certainly consider releasing a free English-English database. Though anyone who wanted to this could do it right now with MakePlecoDict.
We've actually gotten a lot of requests for the ability to suspend / put on hold a flashcard session and return to it later; particularly important on Palm where you can only run one application at a time. So this is another thing on our 2.0 feature list.
Thanks for the kind words on the flashcard system - we're definitely planning to do more with layered complexity in the next version, ideally we'd like to have something more like SuperMemo where you can get a lot of the benefits of the more advanced features without having to actually understand how they work.
And you can already make it easy to reconfigure flags if you just choose "Flag List" in the "Extra info" menu in Test Settings - that will let you change the flags right from the main screen.
Thanks for all the great feedback!
Hello Mike
I considered what you said on the character prediction suggestion:
"Character prediction isn't necessarily all that useful when you're looking up words in a dictionary (since often you'll be looking for one of the least common words that starts with that character)"
However, after using HandDragon's written character input for an age along with KDic and ZDic, I find that, yeah, I really miss this feature (I only used the character prediction with dictionary lookup). I'm not at all expert at Chinese yet, so for any character, maybe I know just a few compounds, so I am still looking up the common words as well as the less common words. Handdragon not only displays a line of up to 10 predicted second characters, but also has a button that, when pressed, displays the next 10 most common compound characters. The 'list' showing results or dictionary entries isn't quite the same.
Of course, I am well aware that you are already incredibly limited for screen space, so that is probably the best reason not to do it.
Cheers
Ben
PS - My lecturer has decided to buy herself a copy for her new PPC to properly evaluate your product and seems to be a convert, showing it to her colleagues in the East Asian Studs dept!
I considered what you said on the character prediction suggestion:
"Character prediction isn't necessarily all that useful when you're looking up words in a dictionary (since often you'll be looking for one of the least common words that starts with that character)"
However, after using HandDragon's written character input for an age along with KDic and ZDic, I find that, yeah, I really miss this feature (I only used the character prediction with dictionary lookup). I'm not at all expert at Chinese yet, so for any character, maybe I know just a few compounds, so I am still looking up the common words as well as the less common words. Handdragon not only displays a line of up to 10 predicted second characters, but also has a button that, when pressed, displays the next 10 most common compound characters. The 'list' showing results or dictionary entries isn't quite the same.
Of course, I am well aware that you are already incredibly limited for screen space, so that is probably the best reason not to do it.
Cheers
Ben
PS - My lecturer has decided to buy herself a copy for her new PPC to properly evaluate your product and seems to be a convert, showing it to her colleagues in the East Asian Studs dept!
I see your point, but perhaps this would be better implemented by offering more flexible results for single-character searches, including an option to sort the results by word frequency. That way, when you look up a single character the first few words listed under it would be the most common ones. So you'd get pretty much the same benefit as a character prediction system, but in a way that fit in better with the dictionary's interface (and that took up less screen real estate).
