Reviewing all premium features of Pleco app for Android on video. What should I test?

[OneEye]

Those are both high-priority items for us, especially now that iCloud has come along and taken away the need to worry about how we'll sync them - merging flashcard statistics is extremely tricky, but checking thousands of attached image / audio files for changes and efficiently handling their uploading / downloading is now something we can do in just a few dozen lines of code. (and I'm optimistic that whatever iCloud equivalent Google announces for Android 5.0 "Baked Alaska" will work similarly)

This is really awesome news. But hopefully it isn't higher priority than releasing that 文言文 dictionary.

[icebear]

I haven't used the handwriting input feature very much. Recently I started working with Skritter which seems much more useful for learning characters - and may eventually replace Pleco as my only flashcard tool (it's a pain having two big sets of flashcards on the go in different apps).

Could you possibly elaborate on this a bit? We're always looking for ways to improve, but we also have a very good relationship with Skritter - in fact we're discussing ways we might do some data exchange between our apps - so if we can't make our system better then perhaps we can at least make it easier for you to use it alongside theirs :-)

Simply put, Skritter just makes it too easy (in a good way!) to jump in without any settings adjustment and get to studying. Pleco has a few simple presets, but none whose behavior matches that of Skritter: mixing all sides (hand writing, definitions, pinyin, tones) in a single test and adjusting scores for each type of test on each word accordingly. That is, I just have to hit "Study" and this happens immediately. I'd think this is how it works under Pleco's "SRS" setting but it seems it only does single sides (or, alternating sides but without respect to score?), and I have to run the test several times (toggling which side to be tested on) every day... I suspect there is a way to closely or exactly approximate Skritters 'mixed SRS' settings, but it isn't obvious and after a read through the manual I didn't feel much closer to getting there (including a few failed attempts - which means lost study time). If such a default 'SRS mixed' setting was offered in the future I'd definitely use it (hint: make it like Skritters, where the first time you load (ever) it asks you which sides to test - allowing you to toggle them on/off once and then forget about it and just click "Study" once a day!).

Specific to handwriting, Skritter's squigs system makes learning/testing on characters much less intimidating for beginners to intermediates. Perhaps its counterproductive at some point (i.e. can be used as a crutch), but I think its great in both reducing discouraging moments (forget one stroke and then am just screwed) and also showing the perfect way to write a character each time I am tested on it - stroke by stroke (not just the final character). If Pleco offered both the easy 'SRS mixed' setting and a squigs system (as opposed to "scratch and select") I'd almost certainly switch to that as my full time flashcard system.

IDEALLY: At the moment I use Skritter for words I learn from textbooks (which I add at a steady pace with lessons), and Pleco to add new words from articles or books that I'm reading in the document reader (which is great, BTW). In Pleco's Flashcards I just use a simple SRS definition test (showing the character and pinyin) which means I can add a huge number of new words to Pleco's set on any given day without worrying about it bogging me down in Skritter for the next week (which is more time consuming, of course) and screwing up my pace with learning from the current textbook. Ideally Pleco would incorporate the two points above, but test all cards in my system for the sides of definition, pinyin and tones while additionally testing handwriting for cards in a specific category (e.g. my "Textbooks" folder). In that case I'd definitely rely solely on Pleco for my flash card needs.

The unfortunate thing is, I suspect almost all of what I've suggested is already feasible in Pleco, but the system is so customizable that it is daunting to dive into. While the manual is helpful in understanding the basics, I still felt pretty lost when I previously tried to approximate a SRS test with pinyin, def and tone cards mixed - having tried a day or two and then just given up and gone back to simple SRS definition tests so that I could at least get on with it. That's why I'd suggest improving the manual and/or offering additional presets that are well documented.

[mikelove]

Thanks for all of this feedback.

I look forward to Pleco advancing the state of the art of Chinese learning in the future with a Siri-like voice recognition system to improve speaking/listening.

I know you were half-kidding, but we actually have speech recognition in our Android app, because Google was kind enough to build Chinese speech recognition into Android. We're looking at how we might get it on iOS as well, though it would probably have to be a paid add-on there (unless Siri is quickly extended to cover Chinese). We'd love to find a way to work it into fill-in-the-blanks flashcards too, but Google's system seems to only want to give us characters and not Pinyin, so we need some way to analyze its highest-ranked character results and figure out what Pinyin it thinks you said.

Me, I like to add example sentences sometimes, often the sentence where I saw the new word crop up in the first place. I like the flexibility Anki gives me to structure the set-up just how I want it, and how I can export and import words. I like to be able to customise. I don't think Pleco comes close there. Not that I need it too.

So you'd be more likely to use Pleco flashcards if we supported custom fields? We've actually been looking at that for a number of reasons anyway - allows for more flexible use of audio / images and allows for one to potentially customize the audio playback using our new TTS system (so you might, say, have the system pronounce the example sentence and the word for new cards, and just the word for older ones).

This is really awesome news. But hopefully it isn't higher priority than releasing that 文言文 dictionary.

No, the basic plan at the moment is one big update with the new dictionaries plus a revamp of our iPhone dictionary UI (and settings), then another big update focused on flashcards and the document reader. Though a few features relating to those - history in the reader, easy dictionary switching during a session in flashcards, better flashcard duplicate handling options - should show up in the first update.

Simply put, Skritter just makes it too easy (in a good way!) to jump in without any settings adjustment and get to studying. Pleco has a few simple presets, but none whose behavior matches that of Skritter: mixing all sides (hand writing, definitions, pinyin, tones) in a single test and adjusting scores for each type of test on each word accordingly. That is, I just have to hit "Study" and this happens immediately. I'd think this is how it works under Pleco's "SRS" setting but it seems it only does single sides (or, alternating sides but without respect to score?), and I have to run the test several times (toggling which side to be tested on) every day... I suspect there is a way to closely or exactly approximate Skritters 'mixed SRS' settings, but it isn't obvious and after a read through the manual I didn't feel much closer to getting there (including a few failed attempts - which means lost study time). If such a default 'SRS mixed' setting was offered in the future I'd definitely use it (hint: make it like Skritters, where the first time you load (ever) it asks you which sides to test - allowing you to toggle them on/off once and then forget about it and just click "Study" once a day!).

Specific to handwriting, Skritter's squigs system makes learning/testing on characters much less intimidating for beginners to intermediates. Perhaps its counterproductive at some point (i.e. can be used as a crutch), but I think its great in both reducing discouraging moments (forget one stroke and then am just screwed) and also showing the perfect way to write a character each time I am tested on it - stroke by stroke (not just the final character). If Pleco offered both the easy 'SRS mixed' setting and a squigs system (as opposed to "scratch and select") I'd almost certainly switch to that as my full time flashcard system.

Thanks for this very detailed reply - really illuminating.

What you describe for "SRS mixed" is indeed possible already, so we definitely need to find a way to make it easier to get at. As far as the "squigs" system, I do like the feedback aspect of it but I'd like to find a different way to achieve that effect (rather than just ripping off Skritter) - not sure what that would be, though. Perhaps it would be enough to skip the "squigs" and just reject incorrect strokes and flag semi-correct ones somehow (coloring them differently, e.g.), but then, after an incorrect character, give you the outline and prompt you to practice writing it again a few times (eventually having you do it once more without the outline). We get a lot of positive feedback about the current sketch box / practice pad feature and a more organized version of that would probably be helpful for a lot of people.

IDEALLY: At the moment I use Skritter for words I learn from textbooks (which I add at a steady pace with lessons), and Pleco to add new words from articles or books that I'm reading in the document reader (which is great, BTW). In Pleco's Flashcards I just use a simple SRS definition test (showing the character and pinyin) which means I can add a huge number of new words to Pleco's set on any given day without worrying about it bogging me down in Skritter for the next week (which is more time consuming, of course) and screwing up my pace with learning from the current textbook. Ideally Pleco would incorporate the two points above, but test all cards in my system for the sides of definition, pinyin and tones while additionally testing handwriting for cards in a specific category (e.g. my "Textbooks" folder). In that case I'd definitely rely solely on Pleco for my flash card needs.

Interesting... why are you identifying handwriting specifically as the one that you'd like to test with a smaller set? Is it because it's a lower priority or because the test itself is more time-consuming?

The unfortunate thing is, I suspect almost all of what I've suggested is already feasible in Pleco, but the system is so customizable that it is daunting to dive into. While the manual is helpful in understanding the basics, I still felt pretty lost when I previously tried to approximate a SRS test with pinyin, def and tone cards mixed - having tried a day or two and then just given up and gone back to simple SRS definition tests so that I could at least get on with it. That's why I'd suggest improving the manual and/or offering additional presets that are well documented.

Indeed - some "recipes" in the manual might be a good interim fix, actually.

[xiaoxiaocao]

Quote

The unfortunate thing is, I suspect almost all of what I've suggested is already feasible in Pleco, but the system is so customizable that it is daunting to dive into. While the manual is helpful in understanding the basics, I still felt pretty lost when I previously tried to approximate a SRS test with pinyin, def and tone cards mixed - having tried a day or two and then just given up and gone back to simple SRS definition tests so that I could at least get on with it. That's why I'd suggest improving the manual and/or offering additional presets that are well documented.

Indeed - some "recipes" in the manual might be a good interim fix, actually.

Some sample flashcard set-ups for different learning goals would be great. It's good having control over so many settings but can be hard to figure out at times.

[peterlkj]

Mike, while we have you here, I just wanted to say, I'm a huge fan of Pleco - must have been using it daily for 5 years.

A couple of questions/requests:

Will there be any changes to the document reader as part of the UI upgrade? A trivial change request would be to give us a choice of background colors for reading there, ie some soft yellows or greys a la iBooks? For me it would make prolonged reading a lot comfortable. Finally, will you also include documents saved for reading in the sync plans?

[mikelove]

Mike, while we have you here, I just wanted to say, I'm a huge fan of Pleco - must have been using it daily for 5 years.

Thanks!

Will there be any changes to the document reader as part of the UI upgrade? A trivial change request would be to give us a choice of background colors for reading there, ie some soft yellows or greys a la iBooks? For me it would make prolonged reading a lot comfortable. Finally, will you also include documents saved for reading in the sync plans?

That first request is already possible - Settings / General / Color Schemes / Standard Mode colors / Other / Document Background.

And yes, documents should be synced along with flashcards etc - like image and audio files, they're actually quite easy to sync as long as we don't insist on merging conflicts (which we wouldn't, if you edited a document on both sides we'd just ask you which version you wanted to keep).

[peterlkj]

That's great! I always looked under the specific settings for Reader.

[icebear]

As far as the "squigs" system, I do like the feedback aspect of it but I'd like to find a different way to achieve that effect (rather than just ripping off Skritter) - not sure what that would be, though. Perhaps it would be enough to skip the "squigs" and just reject incorrect strokes and flag semi-correct ones somehow (coloring them differently, e.g.), but then, after an incorrect character, give you the outline and prompt you to practice writing it again a few times (eventually having you do it once more without the outline). We get a lot of positive feedback about the current sketch box / practice pad feature and a more organized version of that would probably be helpful for a lot of people.

You're right that it doesn't have to rip off Skritter's squigs system to become more useful. I think the issue is getting some feedback during the writing process about what you are doing right or wrong, instead of just getting confused and realizing "Ok I'm stuck on this one... next" too quickly. Coloring strokes of different levels of accuracy would pretty much be there; my other gripe is the pop-up of possible character choices (which in this case I just find distracting - but I can see that being an issue of my habits).

Interesting... why are you identifying handwriting specifically as the one that you'd like to test with a smaller set? Is it because it's a lower priority or because the test itself is more time-consuming?

Testing and repeating missed prompts is much more time consuming than hand writing, and I'd like to prioritize words from my textbooks (NPCR series as well as stragglers from the HSK1-6 series) as those are the most likely for me to have consequences regarding writing ability in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile I enjoy reading material that includes a lot of words outside those lists, but don't want to wait until I've finished learning writing of all the NPCR/HSK words to start studying other words useful to my particular reading tastes. I find I can realistically keep up with a pace of 50-100 new words per week on Skritter, while on my Pleco list I sometimes add several times that (basically whatever words I stumble across reading that I think are worthwhile) and can still keep up with the flood of definition tests - if I added them to Skritter I would botch my schedule of 1 chapter per week in handwriting and generally demotivate myself as the mountain of handwriting reviews loomed on the horizon.

Just wanted to finish by saying that I hope the comments come across as constructive, as I'm a huge fan of Pleco and have many paid add-ons that attest to that. Similarly, I think Skritter is worth the money (for me), and don't mind using both in my study habits. If somewhere down the road one of them sufficiently improves such that my dual studying desires could be met in a single package, that would be convenient, but even at the moment this dual system works pretty well.

Edited January 17, 2012 at 10:46 AM by icebear

[Guest realmayo]

So you'd be more likely to use Pleco flashcards if we supported custom fields? We've actually been looking at that for a number of reasons anyway - allows for more flexible use of audio / images and allows for one to potentially customize the audio playback using our new TTS system (so you might, say, have the system pronounce the example sentence and the word for new cards, and just the word for older ones).

Please note I'm replying in case it's helpful for you, rather than to knock your product! I can't see myself using Pleco flashcards instead of Anki. I don't mind spending a minute or two adding a flashcard if the vocab is in any way tricky or nuanced: I'll paste in a couple of example sentences that I think are useful, maybe add a note about usage. I find this extra information useful when doing reps -- to have the opportunity of reading a correctly answered word in a sentence below the answer field rather than just clicking straight on to the next word. It's also handy to be able to glance through a list which indicates which cards I'm failing a lot on. In the past I used images and audio although I no longer need those.

In short, I can't imagine constructing flashcards on a phone rather than a computer. Add to that all the functions and flexibility of Anki and, well, I don't think Pleco can match it. Not that that's a problem for me: I'm happy to use a teapot for tea and a coffee press thing for coffee, as it were. I can see how someone who finds a much simpler flashcard setup more useful for them would not find any of this relevant. And in fact the one difficulty I have with Anki is that with a big deck it's too slow for me to use on my (android) phone. But, I'm stuck in front of a PC screen all day so I never really need to do SRS on the move.

[icebear]

Additional thought:

This is tailored to my own study habits, but I think it would be helpful if some functionality were added to Pleco that was similar to Skritters 'ban' function (which, I think is a general enough idea that using it wouldn't be infringing on their service...). Ideally I'd like to see it as a category ("Banned") which one can simply move cards to and know they will never be tested. I would specifically be interested in this so that I could occasionally export my entire Skritter database, upload it into Pleco, and then move all those cards into the "Banned" category so that I ensure I'm avoiding the 'problem' of studying the cards twice - more accurately, that I'm spending my time in Pleco flashcards efficiently, that is by studying cards I won't see otherwise.

[irishpolyglot]

Mike, since you are replying here I'll ask some technical questions that you could perhaps help me out with as I go through this really cool app! Can't wait to show off how much fun it is to use this to enhance my experience in Taipei

But here are some minor issues and questions for you:

• I would like to queue several terms to be pronounced or displayed in succession without having to click them. This is useful for when I would like to hear an item on a menu (almost always more than a single dictionary term) that I've just scanned (and especially useful from a tourist's perspective to simply pronounce the entire menu item for a native to hear). In my case I'm mostly interested in seeing the pinyin of the entire phrase so I can pronounce it myself. A translation here would obviously be too complex because of multiple terms, but displaying the pinyin or an audio option for the full phrase seems like it would be a simple queueing issue. Is this part of the software already? It's a two button process for each term otherwise for pronunciation, and even having to press the arrow keys between words as a single button press slows me down to an important degree compared to what seeing the entire phrase would, when I need to say something quickly and there are people behind me at the counter . You've already implemented a feature in the reader that allows the selection to be changed, but it's only being used to change between different characters of a word, and doesn't do anything beyond that. In my mind this should automatically present the pinyin and audio of everything selected.
  
• [Edit: removed this point: found solution]
  
• On my Android, the screen is black on occasion for up to 10 seconds or until I start pressing buttons sometimes when I click the OCR app, especially if within the app already doing something else. This does not happen in any of my other camera using apps. Is it a bug of some sort that you know of?
  
• How can I keep the same term in memory on the OCR when I rotate the screen? If I pause something and then rotate, I lose the term and the pause is cancelled, which is a little annoying as I rotate it naturally to a more comfortable position first.
  

That's it! I imagine some of these issues have workarounds that I've simply missed in the instructions. But otherwise, let me know your thoughts (or if someone else knows a way around the problem let me know).

Loving everything else, and the draw (or write...) feature is actually giving me the right answer most of the time now, even on complex characters, since I followed imron's advice and simply learned the most likely stroke order procedure that's typical (way less complicated than I thought it was), and learned some example characters. Not as bad as I was expecting (thanks for the tip imron!), so I can give a super quick summary in the video so novices could use it, despite what I said before.

[OneEye]

@mikelove,

Something I've noticed recently is that the font (for traditional characters) doesn't conform to either the Taiwanese or Hong Kong standard, but the Mainland standard. Same with the stroke order animations. It's kind of odd to use that standard of a country that doesn't even use traditional characters, IMO. I don't really understand the reasoning behind this, but it's probably the most annoying thing about Pleco right now. And I just noticed that the product page of Pleco boasts that it is "Taiwan- and Mainland-friendly". It's not very Taiwan friendly if you can't even see how the character is written in Taiwan. Is there some way of making this happen? I can usually spot the difference because I've learned how to, but my classmates (and a BIG proportion of the 1000 or so students at my school use Pleco) often get questions wrong because they've written a character according to the mainland standard that Pleco provides. Maybe a switch in the settings or something?

I read once that Far East was not interested in licensing their dictionaries to you. Has there been any headway in this department? A dictionary, doesn't have to be Far East, with Taiwanese usage and (especially) pronunciation would be awesome. As it is I'm having to cross-check everything I learn outside of class with the 國語辭典, which is a pain. Hey, there's an idea! 國語辭典 on Pleco would be a godsend.

[Iriya]

Yes, I also wanted to mention this. The Taiwanese standard is quite different, e.g. the radicals 月(when it means 肉, as in 腰)、艹、雨, etc are all written differently. Some characters are also very different, e.g. 次. See Taiwan's MOE website.

Also, any particular reason you're using 宋体 instead of 楷体? I think the stroke diagrams' main purpose is to help people learn to write by hand, so the characters should really be displayed in 楷体. Most of other stroke order resources use 楷体 (the above mentioned Taiwan's MOE, nciku, zdic, eStroke, etc, etc). The textbooks also all use 楷体.

Note that there are two common 楷体 fonts, simkai is the mainland standard and kaiu (標楷體) is the Taiwan standard.

[OneEye]

Actually, somehow integrating eStroke with Pleco would be ideal, though I don't know if it would be feasible. It would be nice to see the difference between stroke orders in different standards.

[Iriya]

eStroke is nice, but it has many mistakes and doesn't fully conform to the TW standard either.

[OneEye]

Hmm...I don't actually have a copy (still running iOS 4.1, it requires 4.2). That's a shame.

[mikelove]

Wow, lots of feedback here - thanks!

Some sample flashcard set-ups for different learning goals would be great. It's good having control over so many settings but can be hard to figure out at times.

Something like that, yes - I'm more inclined to do it as "recipes," though, that way people can figure out how to get it to do particularly tricky things like mixing multiple test types.

You're right that it doesn't have to rip off Skritter's squigs system to become more useful. I think the issue is getting some feedback during the writing process about what you are doing right or wrong, instead of just getting confused and realizing "Ok I'm stuck on this one... next" too quickly. Coloring strokes of different levels of accuracy would pretty much be there; my other gripe is the pop-up of possible character choices (which in this case I just find distracting - but I can see that being an issue of my habits).

The different choices would definitely be eliminated - those are only shown because we're hooking into our regular handwriting recognizer and it doesn't let us match against a single character at a time. But we're talking to the makers of that recognizer about a new version of it that would. As far as feedback, part of me thinks that once you've screwed up part of the character, you might just want to practice the whole thing again - reveal it all and have the system run you through drawing it a couple of times.

Testing and repeating missed prompts is much more time consuming than hand writing, and I'd like to prioritize words from my textbooks (NPCR series as well as stragglers from the HSK1-6 series) as those are the most likely for me to have consequences regarding writing ability in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile I enjoy reading material that includes a lot of words outside those lists, but don't want to wait until I've finished learning writing of all the NPCR/HSK words to start studying other words useful to my particular reading tastes. I find I can realistically keep up with a pace of 50-100 new words per week on Skritter, while on my Pleco list I sometimes add several times that (basically whatever words I stumble across reading that I think are worthwhile) and can still keep up with the flood of definition tests - if I added them to Skritter I would botch my schedule of 1 chapter per week in handwriting and generally demotivate myself as the mountain of handwriting reviews loomed on the horizon.

That makes sense, yes. Characters-to-definition tests are definitely the quickest and most basic variety and one that can potentially be useful even without learning a word in any other way, so it's logical to let people pound through a large list on them while doing a smaller one for the more interactive tests. And perhaps a still-larger list for remedial items, e.g. tone practice if you never learned tones properly - that you might want to do separately, though, rather than woven into a single test.

Just wanted to finish by saying that I hope the comments come across as constructive, as I'm a huge fan of Pleco and have many paid add-ons that attest to that. Similarly, I think Skritter is worth the money (for me), and don't mind using both in my study habits. If somewhere down the road one of them sufficiently improves such that my dual studying desires could be met in a single package, that would be convenient, but even at the moment this dual system works pretty well.

Thanks!

I can't see myself using Pleco flashcards instead of Anki. I don't mind spending a minute or two adding a flashcard if the vocab is in any way tricky or nuanced: I'll paste in a couple of example sentences that I think are useful, maybe add a note about usage. I find this extra information useful when doing reps -- to have the opportunity of reading a correctly answered word in a sentence below the answer field rather than just clicking straight on to the next word. It's also handy to be able to glance through a list which indicates which cards I'm failing a lot on. In the past I used images and audio although I no longer need those.

In short, I can't imagine constructing flashcards on a phone rather than a computer. Add to that all the functions and flexibility of Anki and, well, I don't think Pleco can match it. Not that that's a problem for me: I'm happy to use a teapot for tea and a coffee press thing for coffee, as it were. I can see how someone who finds a much simpler flashcard setup more useful for them would not find any of this relevant. And in fact the one difficulty I have with Anki is that with a big deck it's too slow for me to use on my (android) phone. But, I'm stuck in front of a PC screen all day so I never really need to do SRS on the move.

Understood - I do appreciate the feedback anyway. Some sort of desktop Pleco flashcard creator is still in the offing - if iOS and then Android hadn't intervened we would have probably released one back in 2008, but now, with us already developing cloud sync support for the sake of tablet users, the barrier between what we have and a syncing desktop solution has gotten considerably lower. Custom fields are coming too, though I realize those still may not quite allow our system to replace Anki for some users.

This is tailored to my own study habits, but I think it would be helpful if some functionality were added to Pleco that was similar to Skritters 'ban' function (which, I think is a general enough idea that using it wouldn't be infringing on their service...). Ideally I'd like to see it as a category ("Banned") which one can simply move cards to and know they will never be tested. I would specifically be interested in this so that I could occasionally export my entire Skritter database, upload it into Pleco, and then move all those cards into the "Banned" category so that I ensure I'm avoiding the 'problem' of studying the cards twice - more accurately, that I'm spending my time in Pleco flashcards efficiently, that is by studying cards I won't see otherwise.

Already possible, actually in two different ways: you can set up your own "Banned" category and then add a "category filter" (in Card Filters) to exclude cards in it, or you can do it to the individual card without creating a new category via the Card Info screen / Statistics / Exclude from all sessions.

I would like to queue several terms to be pronounced or displayed in succession without having to click them. This is useful for when I would like to hear an item on a menu (almost always more than a single dictionary term) that I've just scanned (and especially useful from a tourist's perspective to simply pronounce the entire menu item for a native to hear). In my case I'm mostly interested in seeing the pinyin of the entire phrase so I can pronounce it myself. A translation here would obviously be too complex because of multiple terms, but displaying the pinyin or an audio option for the full phrase seems like it would be a simple queueing issue. Is this part of the software already? It's a two button process for each term otherwise for pronunciation, and even having to press the arrow keys between words as a single button press slows me down to an important degree compared to what seeing the entire phrase would, when I need to say something quickly and there are people behind me at the counter . You've already implemented a feature in the reader that allows the selection to be changed, but it's only being used to change between different characters of a word, and doesn't do anything beyond that. In my mind this should automatically present the pinyin and audio of everything selected.

It's not part of the software already, though we've had a few requests for it - we've been holding off on it until we get our newly licensed synthetic text-to-speech system up and running (should be in the next big update), since that's a lot faster and smoother than playing one recording after another, and for this application it seems like the difference between synthetic speech and actual recordings isn't likely to matter much.

But it's actually a surprisingly difficult problem because of a phenomenon in Chinese you may not yet be familiar with called 多音字 - some characters can have more than one possible pronunciation, and in some cases differentiating between them requires a fairly sophisticated understanding of the surrounding grammar / sentence structure.

On my Android, the screen is black on occasion for up to 10 seconds or until I start pressing buttons sometimes when I click the OCR app, especially if within the app already doing something else. This does not happen in any of my other camera using apps. Is it a bug of some sort that you know of?

That's news to me, and actually rather surprising since your SGSII is a very common device and one that we use here regularly for testing. Are you using any special background memory-clearing utilities? It might be that the fairly hefty RAM requirements of OCR are causing one of those to run and slow down the system. Also, what do you mean by "until I start pressing buttons" - does the screen stay black until you exit Pleco by pressing your device's home button, or do you just fiddle around with the volume switch until OCR finishes loading?

How can I keep the same term in memory on the OCR when I rotate the screen? If I pause something and then rotate, I lose the term and the pause is cancelled, which is a little annoying as I rotate it naturally to a more comfortable position first.

Quite right, we should be able to fix that in the finished version. Thanks; you're actually the first person to point this out - I don't think very many people use it in landscape mode except when their device won't work any other way (or if they're on a tablet, in which case they generally use it that way exclusively). But why are you rotating it to view the definition instead of just tapping the > button to bring it up on a separate screen?

Loving everything else, and the draw (or write...) feature is actually giving me the right answer most of the time now, even on complex characters, since I followed imron's advice and simply learned the most likely stroke order procedure that's typical (way less complicated than I thought it was), and learned some example characters. Not as bad as I was expecting (thanks for the tip imron!), so I can give a super quick summary in the video so novices could use it, despite what I said before.

Thanks!

Something I've noticed recently is that the font (for traditional characters) doesn't conform to either the Taiwanese or Hong Kong standard, but the Mainland standard. Same with the stroke order animations. It's kind of odd to use that standard of a country that doesn't even use traditional characters, IMO. I don't really understand the reasoning behind this, but it's probably the most annoying thing about Pleco right now. And I just noticed that the product page of Pleco boasts that it is "Taiwan- and Mainland-friendly". It's not very Taiwan friendly if you can't even see how the character is written in Taiwan. Is there some way of making this happen? I can usually spot the difference because I've learned how to, but my classmates (and a BIG proportion of the 1000 or so students at my school use Pleco) often get questions wrong because they've written a character according to the mainland standard that Pleco provides. Maybe a switch in the settings or something?

With the font, we're basically just working with what Apple and Google give us - we actually are talking to a few companies about licensing some alternative Chinese fonts, but they're pretty much all mainland-based, since the Taiwan / HK font foundries seem to charge an order of magnitude more money. However, on Android you can freely install your own replacement Chinese font - just put it in /Android/data/com.pleco.chinesesystem/files/fonts/chinese/ and kill / reopen Pleco and it'll use it instead of the built-in system one. We're working to add support for this on iOS as well, but it's a lot harder - on Android it's about 5 lines of code, on iOS it's more like 500.

As far as stroke order, again we're working with what we have - we actually licensed the data for that from Wenlin, and we've had a hard time convincing them to add alternate regional variation support. And modifying their data ourselves to support that is problematic for licensing reasons, though we've had a few discussions about our possibly doing our own fork of their data. We've even been considering developing a new set of stroke order data on our own, but to be honest the money isn't really there for it - most people consider it a fairly minor feature, sadly, and it'd take something like 5 years of stroke order add-on sales before we could expect to break even.

The "Taiwan- and mainland-friendly" comment prefaces the line "supports both traditional and simplified characters (in dictionary definitions, stroke order diagrams, searches, and the handwriting recognizer), and supports Zhuyin (experimentally) as well as Pinyin for headword search and display." Which we do. And the former has actually been quite tricky, since most of the dictionaries we license are from the mainland and include little or not traditional character support when we get them, and handwriting recognizers that work well with both character sets are considerably more expensive to license than recognizers that only work with simplified.

I read once that Far East was not interested in licensing their dictionaries to you. Has there been any headway in this department? A dictionary, doesn't have to be Far East, with Taiwanese usage and (especially) pronunciation would be awesome. As it is I'm having to cross-check everything I learn outside of class with the 國語辭典, which is a pain. Hey, there's an idea! 國語辭典 on Pleco would be a godsend.

Unfortunately no, and the MoE (publishers of 國語辭典) aren't interested in working with us either, sadly. Nor is the Taipei Language Institute (publishers of a couple of nice cross-straits dictionaries). Frankly it seems like if they want to encourage more use of Taiwanese Mandarin they ought to be doing everything in their power to make better tools available for it, but I can't claim to know what the politics are like behind that. We do at least have a Hong-Kong-developed (and hence 繁体字-oriented, though it's still Mandarin rather than Cantonese) C-C dictionary licensed for our big new round of dictionary launches this spring, though.

Also, any particular reason you're using 宋体 instead of 楷体? I think the stroke diagrams' main purpose is to help people learn to write by hand, so the characters should really be displayed in 楷体. Most of other stroke order resources use 楷体 (the above mentioned Taiwan's MOE, nciku, zdic, eStroke, etc, etc). The textbooks also all use 楷体.

Again, that's the nature of Wenlin's data - they designed the data set to also function as a 宋体 font, which it actually does quite well. (and at roughly 1/3 the size of the smallest TTF with equivalent coverage) It's actually designed in such a way that it might feasibly be made to support 楷体 instead, though - we could redesign a particular component once and have it render that way in every character that used it - so again it's just a matter of getting their blessing on our developing a heavily-modified fork of it.

Actually, somehow integrating eStroke with Pleco would be ideal, though I don't know if it would be feasible. It would be nice to see the difference between stroke orders in different standards.

We approached them and they didn't seem interested in working with us. I think they view us as competitors, and in fact we kind-of are; a stroke order module with eStroke's data in Pleco would take away people's primary reason for buying eStroke.

[icebear]

Already possible, actually in two different ways: you can set up your own "Banned" category and then add a "category filter" (in Card Filters) to exclude cards in it, or you can do it to the individual card without creating a new category via the Card Info screen / Statistics / Exclude from all sessions.

Thanks for pointing that out, it will save time on redundant reviews! Slightly technical question - say that I've studied a handful of cards recently which are not yet learned (score < 600), and then add them to this "Banned" category. Will they still count against my total number of unlearned cards being studied when I am using the option to limit the number of unlearned cards being studied at any given time? Ideally those in the excluded/banned list would not count towards this figure...

EDIT: Realized that I can solve the above issue (if it is one, I don't know) by simply selecting that my Skritter import replace any duplicate words (which would ensure they only exist in the excluded list).

Given that, it would be great if at the least there was some interface that allowed one to import/update their Skritters words into a "Skritter" category at the press of a button (I would then mark that category as excluded). EDIT: But this is a pretty painless process already, so hardly a priority in my eyes relative to other issues (improving Flashcard presets/tutorial, UI upgrade which is coming soon hopefully!).

[irishpolyglot]

Thanks for the detailed reply Mike!

Quite right, we should be able to fix that in the finished version. Thanks; you're actually the first person to point this out - I don't think very many people use it in landscape mode except when their device won't work any other way (or if they're on a tablet, in which case they generally use it that way exclusively). But why are you rotating it to view the definition instead of just tapping the > button to bring it up on a separate screen?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd imagine most testing takes place on books indoors, where people will tend to use their phones differently. When outdoors, use of devices is quite different. The reason I rotate is because in landscape mode it's easier (or more comfortable) to take a good photo or hold the camera still, especially with a somewhat bulky phone like mine. It also feels more natural to hold it landscape, because most text I am scanning is left to right (on menus). However, I actually use my phone in portrait mode for everything else. In landscape mode it's difficult for me to press the "view entry" button based on the way my thumbs naturally go up along the side of the device.

This is why I am intuitively rotating the screen immediately after pausing the text, in exactly the same way that I generally rotate the screen immediately after taking a photo. You should know this because if more people plan to use it "in the real world" (not on books), they may use their phone like I do, whether it's efficient or not to just press all buttons in the same orientation. Glad to hear you are fixing that though.

Also, what do you mean by "until I start pressing buttons" - does the screen stay black until you exit Pleco by pressing your device's home button, or do you just fiddle around with the volume switch until OCR finishes loading?

I mean the I can see all the buttons but the camera is not operational until I press the focus button or something like this, when it instantly appears. This does not occur most times when I first access OCR, only when I go back to it from somewhere else in the app. Perhaps there is a conflict with another app I'm running as you suggest, but I only really have popular apps so you may want to make sure there isn't a conflict. And if this were the case it would also happen when I FIRST access the OCR, which it generally doesn't do. If you need me to make a bug report of some kind or more details of the apps I'm running, let me know by email.

OK, I look forward to the synthetic speech in a future update for longer sentences. Thanks for the replies!

[Iriya]

@mikelove

What's your OCR technology based on? Is it custom or also licensed? I've noticed several other apps with OCR support for Chinese (and also Japanese and Korean) on the market, e.g. CamDictionary and DoCoMo's OCR IME. How does Pleco's OCR compare to them?