real world flashcard application

[james]

Hi Mike,
I know you have students in mind when thinking of ways to improve the flashcard module. Here's a suggestion about how to promote it to a different market, those of us who use it in the working world.

Typically, I'm sitting in a meeting with a bunch of people talking business in Chinese. When I hear a word I don't recognize, I write it on the O-E lookup line in pinyin. Often the word is in one of the dictionaries and I then save it as a flashcard. Every few days, I create a new default database, so that I now have many flashcard databases of work related vocabulary. I also do the same with words learned when not working.

The only problem I encounter with this system is when words do not appear in one of my dictionaries, a not uncommon event with technical terms. I'm hoping you can figure out a way for me to be able to store the pinyin word as a card or file that I can later go back and edit into a flashcard once I find out the definition and characters. It would also be nice to be able to add this info to a dictionary database by using a command prompt. In this fashion, one could create a customized professional dictionary.

That brings up another idea. Do you have any plans for members to be able to post flashcard lists and custom dictionaries to a BBS on your site to share with others? Not only would this help new users jump start their learning and promote collaboration amongst your members, it would also be a good sales tool for you.

And here's another plug for a true <back> button, like what one can use in an internet browser. The down carat works only if one is inputting each item to the input line. But in actual use, I find myslef jumping around, whether it be scrolling the dictionary or looking up characters from within a definition. Often times the path from the intial lookup gets too complicated to easily replicate.

Should the day come that you are looking for an even more expanded dicitonary to add to your Pleco portfolio, I'd highly recommend adding the Chinese-English Word Ocean 汉英大辞海 from the 中国中医药出版社. While it does contain medical and botanical words, I find it has any and every business term, abbreviation and common word I've ever come across.

 

[mikelove]

Interesting take... pretty much all of the dictionary licensing business has been conducted in English, so even though I've been dealing with Chinese companies I must admit I've never personally had to think about the "business meeting" user scenario before. But there are certainly a lot of customers out there in your situation...

I think our current design pretty much does what you're asking for as far as adding flashcards; in the new version there's no longer such thing as a custom flashcard entry but rather there's a whole separate custom dictionary in which you can add, edit, and delete entries right on your Palm - adding a new entry to this is very quick and easy and you can expand it or add it to a flashcard list later at your convenience. We're also planning to add a feature to allow you to import word lists from document and memo pad files, so if you find it faster to simply write down the word in Memo Pad in Pinyin and import it into the dictionary later that should also be possible now.

The BBS is something we'd definitely like to do, we put in some of the groundwork for it in the current version with the flashcard import/export buttons (which let you save and restore individual flashcard lists from files) but now that I've finally learned PHP scripting hopefully we can come up with something that'll allow users to more easily contribute flashcard files. With this new import feature it should be a lot easier to rapidly create lists, convert them from other programs like Wenlin, etcetera. Along with this, we're working on a feature to let users annotate dictionary entries with various usage notes etcetera, and we're planning to put up a system to share those notes as well. And of course custom dictionary entries will also be shareable.

A back button is one of the most oft-requested features and we'll definitely be putting something like that into this. And as far as the Word Ocean dictionary, I looked into that and it appears the publication date is 1990 - we might still make inquiries with the publisher, but with Chinese presses especially it's highly unlikely that they'll have an electronic version of a text that old, and I'm afraid we can't possibly manually capture a 6000+ page dictionary.

 

[MichaelK]

A shareable dictionary would be a fantastic idea, but China is not just one dialect ... it's hundreds. How about an option to make a field in the database to specify region. For example. I know in Dongbei, well most, it's impolite to say xiaojie at a restaurant because of the cultural climate there so you should say fuwuyuan. but in Beijing and Shanghai, it's the norm. Something like that could prevent you from many cultural faux pas. Usually they let things go for Weiguoren but sometimes not....

I heard in Chinghuangdao Wo lai lai Wo lai. (none of my Shanghanese friends could make head or tails of it. I think it's just Wo lai. but that's China.)

 

[mikelove]

Adding a brand new field to the database system is kind of tricky, since for space and performance reasons we really don't use 'fields' per se. But assuming that our new annotation feature makes it in, that will allow you to add usage notes for almost any entry and among those notes you could certainly add regional usage info.