New to Pleco, have 2 questions

[kevro740]

I have heard a lot of great things about Pleco, so I decided to to download the app on my new Iphone5. I have only installed the flashcard system additionally.

My first question is when typing in the pinyin into the dictionary why does the results just give you the the pinyin of the that individual character starting with the first tone. For example, if I type in "ni" the first result is 呢. I have to scroll down past some very rare characters before I get to the very common 你. Is there a way I can set the dictionary to show the most common characters first instead of me scrolling down to find it?

My next question deals with the flashcard system. If I download the HSK lists and then I try to create my own custom flash cards, it seems like I am unable to add some expressions and characters to my custom list because they are a duplicate of what's already in the HSK list. Is there a way to put duplicates on your lists? It would seem to be very silly if you weren't.

I am new to this forum, to pleco, and to iphones so please excuse my ignorance. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[mikelove]

My first question is when typing in the pinyin into the dictionary why does the results just give you the the pinyin of the that individual character starting with the first tone. For example, if I type in "ni" the first result is 呢. I have to scroll down past some very rare characters before I get to the very common 你. Is there a way I can set the dictionary to show the most common characters first instead of me scrolling down to find it?

Not in the current release, though it's coming in our next major update. We do sort characters with a particular tone by frequency (so you'll see that 你 comes up first under ni3), but we chose to sort our databases that way rather than to ignore tone and lump all characters with a particular pronunciation together, and it's only in that next update that we're adding the ability for our software to intelligently re-sort by frequency based on what you actually entered.

For right now, the three best workarounds would be a) to use the built-in iPhone Pinyin IME to enter single characters instead of typing the Pinyin directly into our search box, b) to handwrite the character (if you're looking for one that you know anyway), or c) to buy the ABC dictionary, which displays the single most common character (or word, for that matter) with a particular toneless Pinyin at the start of its results before displaying any others.

My next question deals with the flashcard system. If I download the HSK lists and then I try to create my own custom flash cards, it seems like I am unable to add some expressions and characters to my custom list because they are a duplicate of what's already in the HSK list. Is there a way to put duplicates on your lists? It would seem to be very silly if you weren't.

Sure, but by default we simply add the existing card to your new list rather than creating a new card; that way, each word has only a single review history / score / etc, so if you're doing an SRS test on a new vocabulary list you'll get credit for your previous reviews of a word like 你好 and won't end up having to review it a bunch of extra times.

The problem here is most likely that you're not actually adding the card to a new list - you're just adding it to "Uncategorized" which is where cards go if they haven't been assigned to a category yet. To fix this, go into Organize Cards, create a new category, then the next time you want to add a card, tap-hold on the + button and select that category (which will then become the default for subsequent cards until you tap-hold again).

If you don't care about all of this score business and just want Pleco to create as many cards for a particular word as you tell it to, go into Settings / Flashcards and set it to 'Allow' duplicate cards.