iPhone Feature Requests
- Thread starter mikelove
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alanmd
探花
pprendeville said:
Semantic tagging in this context is just letting Pleco know what each part of the dictionary entry means. With some dictionaries it seems that Pleco just sees the whole entry as a blob of text, and doesn't know which part is example sentences, which are the alternate meanings, etc.
pprendeville
探花
I usually need techno language in laymans terms. Understand now. Cheers.
Hi. I've posted before about how I like to study things in lists. I also know that a desktop application for pleco has been discussed but does not yet exist.
Anyway, here is what I would like to do: I would like to be able to export my flashcard lists - ideally put them into a document that I can view on my desktop, and most importantly, physically print out onto paper. (I still sometimes like to use an actual pencil and paper.)
I couldn't figure out how to do it.
This feature would help me ... I don't know if other people feel the same.
Thanks!
Anyway, here is what I would like to do: I would like to be able to export my flashcard lists - ideally put them into a document that I can view on my desktop, and most importantly, physically print out onto paper. (I still sometimes like to use an actual pencil and paper.)
I couldn't figure out how to do it.
This feature would help me ... I don't know if other people feel the same.
Thanks!
alanmd
探花
Z-Lo said:
You can already do this:
- export your flash cards: http://www.pleco.com/ipmanual/flash.html#export (iPhone instructions)
- Import this file into Excel (or similar) as a CSV, using the TAB character as the separator.
- You can either print straight from Excel, or you can copy and paste into Word to play with the layout a bit more.
- (you can use Apple iWork or OpenOffice- they should work just as well)
pprendeville
探花
Trying an app called Memrise for last few days and while it doesn't seem to function well on my iPhone, it does have a good reminder system for studying flashcards where it emails you to remind you to study certain cards. Would be nice to see some sort of reminder system in Pleco to tell you which cards to study and when whether by email or even better, locally on a phone/tablet.
pprendeville said:
I can see the value of maybe adding a local notification if you're using spaced repetition and haven't reviewed your cards for a few days, but this email business feels like overkill to me - if you're actively studying flashcards then you're probably going to want to check back every day or two anyway, and if you don't do that then it probably means you're too busy. The more important thing for us to do on this front is to automate the process of adjusting / spacing out your cards, to avoid overwhelming you with cards to review when you haven't reviewed them for a while.
pprendeville
探花
When working with flashcards it would be nice for cards that I get incorrect to reappear shortly after I have got them wrong. When I'm working on my Integrated Chinese decks, it can take me up to 2-3 hours to get through 40 cards as I read the example sentences and go through grammar or new vocab. A nice feature would be to include an option that you can switch on/off which determines how soon the incorrect card will reappear, for example in 4 cards time it will come up again or in 6 cards time it will come again with some sort of mechanism in place to allow for the fact that it might be close to the end of the deck. I know there is a setting that allows incorrect cards to loop at the finish but I would find such a feature even more convenient.
Hi Mike
I wanted to save the text from the lyrics reader to a document for editing and reading. However, there doesn't appear to be an easy way of doing this. There's no 'select all' option (which is pretty useful in most apps I use, especially the Chinese ones I used with the pasteboard reader), so I slowly scroll down and stretch the selection, then down, stretch the selection, etc, etc. Usually this works for copying dictionary entries for custom card creation and other text but today it just seemed to grab the first two paragraphs. Is it not possible to just have a 'select all' wherever text can be selected - it's really 囧 where Pleco doesn't allow you to shift text easily between components (E.g. lyrics readers to document reader; dictionary entry to custom cards).
Also, now that the iPhone has a built in English dictionary, would it be possible you could include that as a select-hold option? It's such a useful feature and works in most apps. Plenty of times I come across some English word I have no clue about or just wish to clarify and just now I select it then have to open an app with a search box or a notepad, paste the word and select it again. 囧囧囧
Maybe you've already got these functions somewhere in the settings...
Pleco's great all the same though of course - been using it probably 6 hours or more a day over the last few months.
Cheers
Ben
I wanted to save the text from the lyrics reader to a document for editing and reading. However, there doesn't appear to be an easy way of doing this. There's no 'select all' option (which is pretty useful in most apps I use, especially the Chinese ones I used with the pasteboard reader), so I slowly scroll down and stretch the selection, then down, stretch the selection, etc, etc. Usually this works for copying dictionary entries for custom card creation and other text but today it just seemed to grab the first two paragraphs. Is it not possible to just have a 'select all' wherever text can be selected - it's really 囧 where Pleco doesn't allow you to shift text easily between components (E.g. lyrics readers to document reader; dictionary entry to custom cards).
Also, now that the iPhone has a built in English dictionary, would it be possible you could include that as a select-hold option? It's such a useful feature and works in most apps. Plenty of times I come across some English word I have no clue about or just wish to clarify and just now I select it then have to open an app with a search box or a notepad, paste the word and select it again. 囧囧囧
Maybe you've already got these functions somewhere in the settings...
Pleco's great all the same though of course - been using it probably 6 hours or more a day over the last few months.
Cheers
Ben
pprendeville said:
We can certainly look into that - the long-term plan is actually to make SRS more fine-grained (allow for intervals of a few minutes, so that a card's first review after an incorrect answer would naturally come up later in the same session) but that requires some major structural changes to the way our tests work.
caesartg said:
That's because we have to use our own custom text field control for performance / interface-related reasons. (takes a lot of work to make those character tap-lookups so smooth and easy) And since people don't generally use the tap-hold selection system much, we haven't invested a lot of time in getting it to work well with selections longer than a sentence or two. (not because we have any reason not to, simply because it takes a lot of time and we've got other priorities)
In general we've tried to have a Save command everywhere that people might want it, though - I think you're the first person to request one for the Lyrics Reader but it would be extremely easy to add, so we'll look into doing that.
caesartg said:
That's unsupported for the same reason as the selection stuff, though we're working on a fix for this too - actually mainly for the sake of people who don't speak English well and would want to be able to easily look up English words in their native language, but it should also work fine for English-English references.
D
Deleted member 4086
Guest
I would really like to see the HSK level to words and characters, to get a hint of how common a certain word is. Possible?
EDIT: Really, what I'm searching for is a simple way to know how relevant something is for my studies. To know in what words a character is used today isn't very useful (more than to know whether it's a common character or not), because I wouldn't know which of the words are actually commonly used today. If HSK level was featured, this problem would in my book at least become partially solved.
EDIT: Really, what I'm searching for is a simple way to know how relevant something is for my studies. To know in what words a character is used today isn't very useful (more than to know whether it's a common character or not), because I wouldn't know which of the words are actually commonly used today. If HSK level was featured, this problem would in my book at least become partially solved.
Kanin said:
Very possible, yes - if nothing else, we've already implemented (for the big update) a feature to let you see that a word is already in flashcards / pull up a list of the categories it's in, so if you imported the HSK lists into flashcards you could get at a list of which level a word is in pretty easily that way.
Trickyt57
秀才
TWO features I would REALLY like:
1) Flashcards testing against the clock (I.e clock countdown)
2) Fill in the blanks testing to allow more than four blanks.
On the second point, I have added some short phrases to my Flashcards. These are up to 16 characters long. However, I can only test the first four characters. There's more than enough room on an iPad screen to test more.
Thanks and kk
1) Flashcards testing against the clock (I.e clock countdown)
2) Fill in the blanks testing to allow more than four blanks.
On the second point, I have added some short phrases to my Flashcards. These are up to 16 characters long. However, I can only test the first four characters. There's more than enough room on an iPad screen to test more.
Thanks and kk
Trickyt57 said:
Do you want it to actually mark you incorrect if you don't answer in time, or do you want it to simply show you each card for a set duration so that you can review cards without having to keep tapping on the screen? (the former is easier but the latter is actually a much more popular request)
Trickyt57 said:
We've had a few other requests for this, but since we're not really focusing on sentence testing very much in our next release it'll have to wait a bit.
Trickyt57 said:
Ah - well what would happen if you failed the time limit, then? There's already an option to show a timer at the top of the screen, so if you want to push yourself to stay within a certain limit it's easy enough to do that, so are you looking for us to impose some sort of a penalty on your scores if you fail to finish the test in time?
Trickyt57 said:
I agree that learning phrases is useful, I just don't see that much value in supporting them for fill-in-the-blanks - it takes a long time to enter a phrase that way, and I question whether this is something that needs to be remembered precisely like the Pinyin for a specific word; it seems like recalling the phrase to yourself and then revealing it in a self-scored test would be more efficient and achieve pretty much the same benefits. If you're trying to memorize all of the words in a phrase then it seems like memorizing each word separately would be better - then all you have to remember for the phrase is how to put the words together.
But if there's a benefit to fill-in-the-blanks phrase testing that I'm not appreciating then please let me know - certainly willing to have my opinion changed about this.
We do actually have one very big improvement for phrases coming in the form of Chinese Text-to-Speech support - you'll now be able to hear audio for a custom phrase flashcard that sounds normal / not painfully slow like it is now.
perekastor
Member
Hi Mike,
Thank you for this great apps !
I juste have two small suggestions about the Flashcard testing :
Thank you for this great apps !
I juste have two small suggestions about the Flashcard testing :
- - When activating the "Filter head in defns" option, it may only hide the chinese charaters in defs but not the pinyin. For example with the character 了, I can see {partic~} in the defs in the prompt section (Quite easy to guess
)
- - Multi-choice tests showing characters and prompting for pinyin could include several pinyin tone of the same combinaison of initial and finals.
Example showing "马" : -ma -ma3 -ma1 -ma4 -ma2.
It also could be great if multi-choice tests showing pinyin and prompting for characters could offers characters that contains same radical or that pinyin look quite the same with different tone
Example sho "ma3" : -马 -妈 -麻
Thanks for the suggestions.
This is the result of some dictionaries' lack of semantic tagging - should be fixed in a couple of releases once we have every single dictionary set up so that it's obvious which strings of text are Pinyin and which are English, but until we finish that (rather time-consuming) process there's only a limited amount we can do about this unfortunately.
This sort of thing would certainly make the multi-choice mode more useful, so it's just a matter of finding the time to implement it.
perekastor said:
This is the result of some dictionaries' lack of semantic tagging - should be fixed in a couple of releases once we have every single dictionary set up so that it's obvious which strings of text are Pinyin and which are English, but until we finish that (rather time-consuming) process there's only a limited amount we can do about this unfortunately.
perekastor said:
This sort of thing would certainly make the multi-choice mode more useful, so it's just a matter of finding the time to implement it.
This isnt a pure iPhone request, i think everyone would b happy to have, though maybe android users have and i m unaware.
anyways, it's bout the flashcards...for one of th biggest problems is that some (a lot) words in chinese have more than 1 meaning, now, when u add a card to your flashcard database, it basically adds all of the definitions with them.
now, i know you can make your own user card, but that complicates it in a different way, cause when you search a card in categories, your user 1 and the normal 1 dont appear in the same search list as they are different.
how about adding a kind of "pointer" to the actually meaning u r testing yourself. at least for the pleco defs.
as an exxample:
jia1 = 家.number 4 is "a specialist in a certain field"
while learning, i'll actually see alot of defs, though i m only trying to learn number 4. i think ther should b a way make it easier just by marking the def u r learning. plus a change of color would b nice (-:
this way the card isnt changed.
i know it might make some problems with score system, but then again, how would it would b helpful to mark the jia1 card as learnt while i only know 1 meaning of it?!
thanks.
anyways, it's bout the flashcards...for one of th biggest problems is that some (a lot) words in chinese have more than 1 meaning, now, when u add a card to your flashcard database, it basically adds all of the definitions with them.
now, i know you can make your own user card, but that complicates it in a different way, cause when you search a card in categories, your user 1 and the normal 1 dont appear in the same search list as they are different.
how about adding a kind of "pointer" to the actually meaning u r testing yourself. at least for the pleco defs.
as an exxample:
jia1 = 家.number 4 is "a specialist in a certain field"
while learning, i'll actually see alot of defs, though i m only trying to learn number 4. i think ther should b a way make it easier just by marking the def u r learning. plus a change of color would b nice (-:
this way the card isnt changed.
i know it might make some problems with score system, but then again, how would it would b helpful to mark the jia1 card as learnt while i only know 1 meaning of it?!
thanks.
yuvalcho said:
It seems like you really just want a way to generate multiple cards from a single one, each of which points to a different definition - would that cover you? Basically we'd need 1) a better way to manage multiple duplicates (for example, a duplicate prompt that lets you flip through all of them so you can see if any match the definition you want to add), 2) a way to select just one sub-definition when creating a card, and 3) a way to split an existing card into multiple definitions.