games test

[Anonymous]

Hi there - not sure if this is a feature yet, but I think it's pretty nifty when practicing vocabulary with friends... It's a simple game, that ought to be easy enough to program - someone says a two-character word, and the next person, using only the pronunciation of the second character (tones matter, of course) comes up with a new two-character word, and so on. Usually we don't allow words that end in ran or zi, because of the relative ease in forming those words.

If it were programmed into plecodict, it could be something like a vocabulary-solitaire quiz, very useful and fun.

Just an idea, before I go out and buy a palm pilot so I can download this pretty spiffy program.

 

[mikelove]

Hmm, hadn't heard of this game being used with Chinese before. It seems like the trickiest thing about implementing it would be managing the list of words - you wouldn't want to allow the entire 200,000 entry ABC dictionary or else you'd have much too high a chance of happening upon a random correct word (like a bad Scrabble player). Anwyay I don't know if this exact game will end up getting implemented but we'll certainly think about it - expanding the number of ways of testing yourself on flashcards is a big priority for us in the next major release.

 

[Yifeng]

I think I might've described it badly - it's more of a vocabulary builder than anything else. I was thinking you'd first write in the two-character word and then the dictionary would shoot back with another two-character word that began with the same sound as the one you wrote in.

Oh - I think I see the problem - if you were typing in pinyin for example, you could just guess sounds and happen upon something. Usually when we play outloud we have to say the definition with the word - maybe this could be coordinated with keywords in defintions?

But even if people did cheat on the test and enter in words they didn't know were words, it'd still be good fun to get the entries back from the computer, flag them as flashcards, and build up.

 

[mikelove]

It might be possible to coordinate it with the definitions, perhaps with a multiple-choice list of meanings (taken from similar-sounding words). The main question is whether this sort of random walk is the best way to build one's vocabulary, or whether one is better off working with a carefully-developed list of lessons and review words - perhaps we could come up with something similar to this but with a more narrowly confined list of vocabulary. Anyway we'll certainly think about it and see what sorts of designs we can come up with. Thanks very much for the suggestion.