Two Questions for Flashcard Functions on 2.0.3

[Mudhead]

Hi there,

I recently got Pleco linguist and first of all I have to say that it is an amazing software. I only regret that I didn't get my hands on it earlier. It is not cheap, but I have the feeling it was worth the investment. What I use most often is clearly the flashcard function. I am almost doing nothing else whenever I am on the bus or train currently working through HSK 3 mostly.

There are two issues I am still unclear about though.

1) I use Wenlin for most of my reading on the computer. One function I really like is that when you click on the definition page of a word, its rank in the most frequently used 4000 or so characters comes up. This gives you an idea if you should no it or if it is "ok" not to know it (for me everything above 3000 is clearly ok). Pleco gives me tons of statistics on the Char Info page, but so far I wasn't able to identify one which is similar to this Wenlin feature. Is there one, and if yes, which one is it?

2) When I look up words I store of them in a separate flashcard folder. However, since I have downloaded the HSK 1-4 flashcards most of these characters or compound words already have a flashcard. What i get then is the message "duplicate card." When I later try to find it so I can add it to me looked up folder, I can't find it. This means I have to fish the relevant words from the HSK lists and manually add them. This is quite troublesome. Is there any more efficient way to handle this?

Thanks.

Christoph

 

[sfrrr]

Hi there,

I recently got Pleco linguist and first of all I have to say that it is an amazing software. I only regret that I didn't get my hands on it earlier. It is not cheap, but I have the feeling it was worth the investment. What I use most often is clearly the flashcard function. I am almost doing nothing else whenever I am on the bus or train currently working through HSK 3 mostly.

There are two issues I am still unclear about though.

1) I use Wenlin for most of my reading on the computer. One function I really like is that when you click on the definition page of a word, its rank in the most frequently used 4000 or so characters comes up. This gives you an idea if you should no it or if it is "ok" not to know it (for me everything above 3000 is clearly ok). Pleco gives me tons of statistics on the Char Info page, but so far I wasn't able to identify one which is similar to this Wenlin feature. Is there one, and if yes, which one is it?

Christoph

When you bring up the popup definition (I double tap on a character), do you see that little number to the right of the bottom of the character box? That's the frequency. I believe 1 is most common and 5(?) is least. (First 5000 words only?) You may have to set up the popup definition to show this data: Go to the Modules menu, click on Character Information, and then use the various drop-down boxes to select what you want to see on that page.

 

[Mudhead]

Thanks. I have seen this number but without any qualification it is meaningless. Does 1 stand for the first 1000 and 5 for 4-5000? In any case, this is a very rough frequency. It does imho make a big difference if a character is within the 1001 or the 1999 most frequently used ones.
Wenlin gives you exact number like 796 of the character '庭.' Sure, since this is based on a frequency assessment of a certain sample of texts. It might be different from the material that you mostly read. Yet it is a nice estimate that gives you an idea about a character. If this thing is not yet included, I recommend including this into Pleco.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks! I'm glad you're liking our software so far. Re your questions:

1) The Unihan section of the instruction manual goes into some detail about what all of the various fields mean. The frequency and HanyuPinlu fields are probably the most useful for getting character frequency, though we do need to do something about frequency listing / sorting in general since people have been asking us for better frequency ordering support for quite a few years now. HanyuPinlu is more detailed than the basic frequency's 1-5, and ranks the frequency of different pronunciations of a character separately (useful since they often have different meanings / are learned separately), so that one's well worth looking at.

2) By default, duplicate cards should still be added to the default / selected flashcard category if they're not already in that category, so if you tap-hold on the flashcard add button and select the category you want to add the new card to, it should be added to that category even if it's a duplicate card. Likewise, if you go into "Manage Categories" and set a new default category, cards will be added to that category when you tap (not tap-hold) on the add button, and this too should work even with duplicate cards.

 

[Mudhead]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the reply. Responsive online staff is one "feature" of Pleco that I really appreciate.

1) Ok, but I still have some difficulty to interpret the numbers. "the numeric string ... indicates the sum total of the frequencies of the pronunciations of the character as given in HYPLCD."
So what then does '6060' for the character '好' in the pronunciation 'hao3' mean? 6060 times per X characters of texts? What does the X stand for? If that is so, then I would still welcome a real rank that tells me immediately what the relative position of a character within the most commonly used 4000 or so is.

2) That solves the problem.

 

[mikelove]

1) It's a relative frequency, not a rank, so that 6060 means it's more frequent than a character with value 6059 and less frequent than a character with value 6061. So not as useful as a frequency ranking, that's true.