Flashcards count unique characters

[Anonymous]

I've purchased PlecoDict and I'm very happy with it. It has helped me out a lot. What a great piece of software I must say...

I've been also using the Flashcards, but I can't find any counter for UNIQUE characters inside the Flashcards. I would like to know how many unique characters are in all the Flashcards I've created, so not words, but characters (not "ci", but "zi"). Is it possible to see it in any way? That would be great, Thanks!

Oh yeah, just one other thing, I just installed the new version (1.0), but now I get USR dictionary or something, when I press on the dictionary switch button (ABC/OX)... What is that USR?

 

[mikelove]

There's no way to do this right now, but it's an interesting idea. The only tricky thing I can foresee in implementing it is distingushing between entries and characters - there are some characters that have more than one Mandarin pronunciation and hence more than one dictionary entry, and if we only wanted to include each character once we'd pretty much have to manually go through and retrieve every entry in every list to check for those duplicates.

But I'll ask the question I usually ask with flashcard-related suggestions: how would you use this feature? What would it help with? If you're just trying to figure out the number of characters you can recognize, a better strategy for that would be a dedicated character test function, one that would take say 50 characters at random from a pool of 10,000, test you on them, multiply the percentage correct by 10,000 and give you an estimate of the number of characters you know - one of our competitors already does this and it's something we might implement ourselves in 2.0.

USR is the user-created dictionary, for entries you add yourself either directly or through the flashcard "Import" feature - it doesn't show up if you don't have any entries in it, so if it's appearing now it's probably because you imported a flashcard list which contained some words that weren't in any of our dictionaries. (there are a few in the HSK that aren't covered by any dictionary we offer - the ABC list is better in this regard since all of its entries are in the ABC dictionary)

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your reply. I think it would be very helpful to see how many unique characters you know instead of the number of words, because it's both a totally different thing. It will give a good indication of the amount of characters you know (if you add all the words you know to the flashcards)...

I hope it is possible in future releases.

 

[mikelove]

That's true, the main question is whether someone's flashcard lists are an accurate reflection of how many characters they know. I suppose this would improve somewhat if we filtered by rank, since that way we could classify this by how well people actually knew it. Anyway we'll think about it but I'm not sure if this makes more sense than a more universal character tester. Thanks for the suggestion.