Flashcards - similar pinyin/sound

[PietStevens]

How can I get Pleco to select cards with similar pinyin or similar sound in one test? I have a 2 categories with about 1200 words in total which I have been studying. I now need to drill on similar sounding words as I confuse those. So, what is the way to set up a card selection that picks all sets of similar sounding words? E.g., if I want a test with 50 words, Pleco should first pick one word according to the scores so far, then pick all similar sounding words, and then pick the next word, and similar sounding words etc... until the 50 words are reached.

 

[mikelove]

There's no built-in facility for that, so you'd have to group them into a separate category for each group of similar-sounding ones - you could make it a bit easier by setting the sort order in the Manage Cards screen to "pron" "asc", that way cards with similar pronunciations would be listed together which would make it easier to put each group in the same category.

Automating this would be an interesting idea for a future release, but it would be well beyond the performance / memory capabilities of Palm OS so it won't be possible until after we drop Palm support.

 

[PietStevens]

I have searched across the 2 lists and sorted as per your recommendation. It would be nice to be able to sort without taking into account tones. Is there any way to use the Batch command to automatically assign a category to words that differ only in tone? Or to cards that are similar in some way?

Some form of awk/grep would make this very simple.

If that is not possible, a way to manually select multiple cards (e.g., by ticking them off) and then letting pleco apply a category to them with one command would also go quite a way. Now, I have to do 5 taps for each individual card I want to add to my new category (tap on 'i', tap on 'edit', tap on the category, tap on 'Done', tap on 'Done').

Are the flashcards accessible through SQlite? How could I achieve the above without a change in Pleco, but by using SQLite (I am using the PalmOS version)

 

[mikelove]

Grep search is another thing we unfortunately can't do until post-Palm, though it's an excellent idea for then - I think SQLite even has a hook built-in somewhere to make it easy to add grep support with an external library.

You don't need to do five taps to add a card to a category, though - just select the category from the popup list (right below the list of cards in Manage Cards) and tap on the green + button to add it to the category.

The cards are accessible through SQLite (just open the internal database file up in a standard SQLite browser program and it should open pretty much seamlessly) but the format for category assignments is a bit tricky so it would be tough to apply them outside of Pleco.