Review yesterday's cards

[mikeo]

The sound is great, the new flashcard system is both powerful and flexible, the new CHinese-chinese dictionary is wonderful: there are a lot of things I love about 2.0 Pleco.

But I haven't yet figured out how to do something I used to do every day with Pleco 1: review the day's flashcards, and no others. I've combed the manual looking for a simple way to do it and haven't found the way yet. The closest was this statement from http://www.pleco.com/manual/flashintro.html "However, you can test cards in the order in which you created them by choosing "Random" card selection and checking the "Don't shuffle session cards" box in the "General" tab of Advanced Settings." But I see no box labeled "Don't shuffle session cards" in the general tab of advanced settings, so I'm stumped.

I've tried the day filter and that doesn't seem to work to select just yesterday's cards. They weren't necessarily created yesterday, they were only "added" yesterday and there were other cards in the list that were the same. Perhaps this is why - there is no filter for "date card was last added, even if it was a dupe?"

Question 1: So, the first question is, are there settings which would allow you to keep adding cards to a set but only review the ones you added the day before?

Question 2: If you have a card in with one dictionary entry, how do you get the other dictionaries' entries for that same word as you review the flashcards? Or are you limited to only one dictionary definition per card? What I'd like is to see both the English and the CHinese dictionaries' definitions for the same chinese phrase.

Question 3: when you add a card which already exists, is there any record made of that addition, e.g. by updating the modification date or some date field in the card? Or is the addition simply ignored?

 

[mikelove]

Have to update that flashcard intro document - the way you do that now is to choose "Fixed" card selection instead of Random.

1) Not right now unless you set the system to allow all duplicate cards. In 2.0.1 we're planning to change things so that cards' modification dates are updated whenever their category assignments change (and adding a "modified" option to the card filter setting), so once we do that, that will give you a way to look for flashcards that you've created or added to a new category within the past day. Flashcards that were entirely duplicated (i.e., already existed and were already in the selected category) would not be modified, though, but they wouldn't have come up under this search in 1.0 either.

2) There's no way to switch dictionaries on a card during a session in 2.0, though it's another thing we're thinking about adding in a later update - you can, however, highlight the card's headword after it's revealed and use the "popup definition" feature to look up the word in another dictionary that way.

3) Right now there's no record, in 2.0.1 there'll be a record if the category changes. Updating the modification date whenever the card is added (even if it's a duplicate) is an interesting thought, though - anyone else want to weigh in on that? Would you folks who are lobbying for more detailed duplicate card support find this a useful addition, or would you prefer that modification dates only change if some part of the card's data was actually updated?

 

[renovator]

I played with duplicate cards today. First tried exporting .xml and then opening in Excel. Too much hassle. The I just went to the Managed FlashCards>advanced>All cards in top box sort by headword ascending and display headword and pron. Then went down page by page looking for duplicate pinyin. I found that 95% of the time, the duplicate card that had the same headword and same pinyin was from a list that was sitting in my computer that I recently imported. The nice thing was that the sort order always gave me the oldest card first, followed by the card from the new list. I then put the new list name in the bottom dropdown box to add and subtract categories. This allowed me to click on the first duplicate and confirm that was the card I wanted to keep, hit the green + add to category box which would add the old card to the new list with all of its statistics and the highlight would drop down to the duplicate card which I could then just delete.

I was able to go through about 2500-3000 cards per hour this way and found about 80 duplicate cards per 5000 cards. I did miss a few because as a quality control, I then went to the new list and did a sort by score of 100 to still find a few of the duplicates I had missed from that list.

To make this long story short, a quick and dirty first step would be to be able to go to all cards and have a button that would pick out the duplicate headwords. Then a quick decision could be made which to keep and which to get rid of. That way I would not have to go through thousands of cards to look for the duplicates (and probably miss a few). Get quite a headache after a few hours of doing that.

More sophistication could be added later.

 

[gato]

Updating the modification date whenever the card is added (even if it's a duplicate) is an interesting thought, though - anyone else want to weigh in on that? Would you folks who are lobbying for more detailed duplicate card support find this a useful addition, or would you prefer that modification dates only change if some part of the card's data was actually updated?

I would prefer that the current "fixed" order of testing be retained so that we can be tested in the order that cards are first added (i.e. created). If a card is added as a duplicate, I still would want to be tested on it in the same order as before (at least under the "fixed" mode).

Maybe add an extra sort order by modification or latest add date if that's needed, but please keep the sort by creation date/card ID option as well.

 

[stephanhodges]

One problem I have with duplicates is that I don't see the category that the card is "aready" in when testing. One can go through a number of steps to find it (click the "I", click Edit Card, etc). I still would like to see that category name as one of the options to display when reviewing.

If you ever add the ability to test on individual characters within lists, I think this also would be helpful, although in that scenario, seeing the word it came from would also be useful.

I really use duplicates in a different way than most. I cannot keep up with the number of new words each week, so I always have many "duplicates", but I want to have separate scores and "entry date" per card, so that I can see all words in order within a particular chapter of a book.

So, I'd like the ability to be able to find duplicates, and then optionally be able to merge "some" of them (not necessarily all). For example, if there were 5 duplicates of a word (I have 3 years of word lists), then I might want to merge a couple of them to a single score file, etc., but leave the others alone. Often "duplicates" really aren't, since there are many definitions and usages of a single word, which are studied at different course levels.

That all said, I'd really settle for almost all the manipulation on the desktop, with the sole proviso of being able to add a quick note and tag to a word while doing flashcards, etc. (I know we can already set up the tag part)

 

[mikelove]

renovator - just added a "duplicate" search option in Manage Cards yesterday, actually It's kind of slow (goes through all of your cards one-by-one and checks each of them duplicates; a GROUP BY + HAVING SQL query would be a lot faster but would also take a lot more effort to implement so that's not an option until 2.1) but you end up with a headword-sorted list of all of your duplicated cards which you can then go through and delete / edit. Having an option to quickly merge these would be nice too, but that'll probably have to wait for a later version.

gato - oh we're certainly not getting rid of that, we're just adding additional options to it - "Fixed" will likely now have "sort by" and asc/desc options below it. But we know some people like to sort by created order so we wouldn't want to get rid of that.

stephanhodges - actually used your flashcard file as one of the test files for that aforementioned duplicate search, and for what it's worth you had a total of 90 duplicates, nearly all single-character and none with more than two cards But handling more than two duplicates would certainly make sense - the best approach might be a more powerful version of the duplicate prompt that comes up during imports, one which lets you scroll through all of the duplicates, edit / merge / delete any of them (including the old card if you're running this on your existing cards), or merge all of them together into one big card.

 

[renovator]

renovator - just added a "duplicate" search option in Manage Cards yesterday, actually It's kind of slow

Thank you very much - awesome, sure it will be much faster,less headache and more accurate than going through the cards one by one manually.

 

[stephanhodges]

Actually, I don't mind duplicates. :shock:

One thing that I'm frustrated with is being able to look up a word, and get the full entry on the screen (for example in the reader) FROM the manage flashcard screen. Often I am in class, and want to look up a word in the list to refresh my memory. Now, I have to find the word, then copy, click 3 ! (or 4?) times "done" to get back to main screen, THEN paste before I can see the word, where I can then magnify, show stroke order, etc.

 

[mikelove]

stephanhodges - been thinking about adding a "Preview" button to Card Info, actually, though I'm not sure which release that might actually make it into - that would bring up the flashcard fullscreen and allow you to easily edit / cross-reference it, though. The Edit Card screen would actually come pretty close to allowing that now for fixed / dictionary-based cards at least.