Sentence Flash Card Question

[Andongni]

My apologies if this is answered somewhere else, I've looking around for about an hour and haven't found out how to do this. Also, I'm not the most technology savvy person.

I would like to create sentence flash cards from scratch. Now I know I can do this in Pleco itself, using the New Card feature and inputting the sentence, definition, etc. But I have found this to be very time consuming and a bit laborious using my little iTouch. It would be a whole lot faster and less painful if I could do this on my computer, using notepad or something, and then dragging the txt file into my iTunes Pleco documents and then importing it as a flash card. I tried this with notepad and it imports successfully except it isn't distinguishing the sentence (Chinese characters) from the definition (in this case English translation), so when I test, it's all together so obviously defeats the purpose. I read on the help about using one tab between the Chinese characters and the definition and it will make the distinction but it didn't work. Is it possible to type the sentences and the definition so when I import it it will distinguish what's "headword" and what's "definition"? I hope I'm describing my problem clearly. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

 

[character]

Just a guess, but some text editors have a setting to convert all whitespace to spaces when saving. It's easy to check if that is the problem -- pull up your document and see if you have spaces or tabs.

You might try exporting a flashcard set made in Pleco and editing that to contain new entries.

 

[mikelove]

Just a guess, but some text editors have a setting to convert all whitespace to spaces when saving. It's easy to check if that is the problem -- pull up your document and see if you have spaces or tabs.

You might try exporting a flashcard set made in Pleco and editing that to contain new entries.

That sounds like the most likely explanation, yes. Also, if you have a copy of Excel or another spreadsheet program, you could export the file as tab-delimited text from that, though the problem is that a lot of those wrap up separate columns in quotation marks (which our software doesn't yet know how to filter out).

 

[Andongni]

Thank you guys for replying so quickly. I reopened the note pad file and the tab was maintained..it's didn't revert back to a space. Also, I tried the excel thing and tried saving as text tab delimited file and it said "the selected file type does not support workbooks that contain multiple sheets". I don't even know what this means...like I said I don't know very much about this stuff. Can anyone give me kind of step by step way to do this? Or does anyone have a template I could use so I could just edit it? Thank you!

 

[Andongni]

Okay actually I think I figured out a solution. I downloaded a flash card set from the flashcard exchange, actually it was an old post I had put up many months ago, which I don't even remember how I made it, but I just deleted everything and used the same format, where I wrote the Chinese characters first, then I figured out because I don't have need for the pinyin, to use two tabs before I write the definition and it seems to recognize this and separates them when I test. The only thing is, because I'm testing from definition to Chinese characters, when it reveals the answer it gives both the characters and the definition, I'm not sure why this is, but it's the best I've figured out..if anybody still knows I better solution to this, I would be interested to know, but this will do for now, thanks again!

 

[mikelove]

Okay actually I think I figured out a solution. I downloaded a flash card set from the flashcard exchange, actually it was an old post I had put up many months ago, which I don't even remember how I made it, but I just deleted everything and used the same format, where I wrote the Chinese characters first, then I figured out because I don't have need for the pinyin, to use two tabs before I write the definition and it seems to recognize this and separates them when I test. The only thing is, because I'm testing from definition to Chinese characters, when it reveals the answer it gives both the characters and the definition, I'm not sure why this is, but it's the best I've figured out..if anybody still knows I better solution to this, I would be interested to know, but this will do for now, thanks again!

That makes sense, yes - you need the two tabs to separate the headword and definition. A more robust importer (that supports .csv along with .tab and lets you vary which columns you use) is on our to-do list.

Re your other issue, that's actually normal behavior and we think it works better than showing one "side" of the card at a time - once the definition is revealed it's important to reinforce the link between that and the headword, and that's best accomplished by putting them on the same screen.