VocabCards makes Anki flashcards w/ Pinyin+English from Chinese word lists

[Yang Chuanzhang]

Hi,

I spent the last few days turning a program that I've been using for over a year into a web app.

VocabCards takes a list of Chinese words and returns flashcards with Chinese, Pinyin and English ready for import to Anki. You can learn more about it and see an example flashcard here or try it out for yourself:

http://www.yemaohao.com/vocab-cards

Yang Chuanzhang

[prateeksha]

This is an awesome effort. I like everything from the complete transcripts, the 地道口语 to the creating flashcards function.

Great job, guys!

[laurenth]

Your site is becoming awesome.

Just an observation: as VocabCards produces a tab separated text, it should be possible to import it in any flashcard programme, not just Anki. I mostly use Anki, but I believe Pleco (very popular around here) can also import tab separated text.

However, the </br> html code inserted at the end of the line might be superfluous and appear "as is". I don't have Anki here to try an import, but this code might be superfluous in Anki too.

[Yang Chuanzhang]

Thanks for your comments! I'm glad you like the site.

@laurenth That's a great idea. I've never used anything but Anki personally, but I'll check if I have to tweak anything to make it work in Pleco too.

You're absolutely right, the <br> is superfluous at the end of lines, but some dictionary entries have more than one reading. Those entries have more than one line and the <br> is needed.

[mikelove]

Pleco does indeed import tab-separated text - format is:

characters<tab>pinyin<tab>English

One entry per line, numbers preferred over tones for Pinyin (it supports both, and will render them with tone marks regardless, but numbers are more resistant to parsing errors). It won't currently do anything with those <br>s, though support for that is coming in a future release.

But it also can fill in Pinyin and English for a word list on its own, so the main reason to use this would be if you wanted to modify that stuff before importing it. A lot of people do like to do that, though, and if you're one of those people it would certainly be a lot easier to do that on a computer than on an iPhone.

[Yang Chuanzhang]

Hi mikelove, thanks for the clarification.

I've added support for Pleco. If that radiobox is checked, it exports every pronunciations separately and doesn't add any html so it's

重點 <tab> zhong4 dian3 <tab> important point / main point / focus / key (project etc) / to focus on / to put the emphasis on

重點 <tab> chong2 dian3 <tab> to recount (e.g. results of election) / to re-evaluate

instead of

重點 <tab> zhong4 dian3 important point / main point / focus / key (project etc) / to focus on / to put the emphasis on<br />chong2 dian3 to recount (e.g. results of election) / to re-evaluate<br />

Thanks for making Pleco btw! I use it everyday and I'm really looking forward to the iOS update.

[mikelove]

Cool!

I forgot to mention that we support combining simplified and traditional on one line - in fact this is preferred, since it's more accurate (sometimes there's one simplified that maps to multiple traditional characters, as I'm sure you know) and it's how entries created from within Pleco are stored (so it matches up with them for duplicate-checking). To do this, put simplified followed by traditional in square brackets in the character section, like this:

simplified[traditional]<tab>pinyin<tab>definition

Also, a non-Pleco-specific bug: using the built-in simplified Pinyin IME in Safari on Mac OS 10.7, as soon as I start entering a character in the input box, the computer freezes up and then in a few seconds I'm redirected to a new page (same URL) which then fails to load with an error. Not seeing the same issue in Firefox or in Chrome.

And you're very welcome! Glad you're finding Pleco useful - the iOS update is taking forever, but it's looking better and better and we're doing some really neat, never-before-seen-in-a-Chinese-dictionary stuff in it.

[Yang Chuanzhang]

Hi,

thanks for providing me with all that information, I just uploaded [1] a version that combines simplified and traditional characters the way you described for export to Pleco. I disabled the radio buttons for simp/trad at first but then I realized that different records get returned for characters like 只 depending on what the user selects. After writing this small webapp, the amount of money I'm willing to pay you for taking care of this character mess for me on the iPhone has at least tripled

Cool, my first bug report, haha. Unfortunately this is a bug in bootswatch, the css framework I'm using for the site and I have absolutely no idea how it works internally. I opened an Issue on their github page, if they don't react, I might think of something else. Thanks for telling me!

[1] http://www.yemaohao.com/vocab-cards