iPad for Learning Chinese

[putonghua73]

I second imron's recommendation of Pleco. I used to have all my flashcards in Anki, but now I just use Pleco. It saves me a ton of time and effort.

Regarding imron's point above, you can customize any automatically-generated Pleco cards, so it's not an issue unless you need to add pictures or custom sounds to the cards. If you prefer making your own cards, you can do so within Pleco, or you can create cards on your computer and then import them into Pleco.

Thank you feihong (and imron) for confirming what I wanted to hear vis-a-vis using Pleco re: creating one's own flashcards. Anki is complex, powerful, and extensible. It is also potentially the equivalent of using a hammer to crack a walnut for basic flashcard use.

I want the following from any SRS application

• auto-populate pinyin
  
• auto-populate colour-code (ability to define colours)
  
• auto-populate definition
  
• auto-populate measure word
  
• auto-populate sound
  
• create cards from tablet (iPad)
  
• add custom fields (e.g. example)
  

Nice to have:

• synchronize across devices (not a must as I prefer to create and review using my iPad)
  

If the Pleco SRS add-on allows the above, then I'm going to switch because I want the convenience of being able to create a card on my iPad.

Update: from reading the Pleco forums, it appears that one cannot create custom fields to incorporate example sentences. This is problematic. I have to weigh up the convenience and GTD [getting things done] factor with Pleco vs the customization and extensibility of Anki.

It boils down to Imron's statement:

It saves me a ton of time and effort.

I'd rather put the time and effort into studying and learning. I will achieve this via Pleco's solution, rather than persisting with Anki's. Time for a clean sweep!

[imron]

auto-populate pinyin - Yes

auto-populate colour-code (ability to define colours) - Yes

auto-populate definition - Yes

auto-populate measure word - Not really, though depending on the dictionary this may be included in the definition.

auto-populate sound - Yes, but sounds are a separate in-app purchase.

create cards from tablet (iPad) - Yes

add custom fields (e.g. example) - Yes, but I've never really done it so I don't know how easy it is to use.

[icebear]

And word is the next update of Pleco should include example sentences in some way or another (I think).

[ChTTay]

" it appears that one cannot create custom fields to incorporate example sentences. This is problematic."

I add example sentences to my pleco flashcards. Its very easy. Just convert the card to a custom card, then go into whichever part of the flashcard you want the example and type away!

I don't think you can add a field. I just add my example to the definition part usually or occaisionslly to the "face" or "front" of the flashcard.

[mikelove]

Flashcards can certainly display example sentences from the dictionary entry that they link to, but custom flashcard fields are indeed not supported yet (unless you edit the definition, as ChTTay says). However, they're likely to be supported in some form by our next update, as we have a strong incentive to get them in there to work with our (already-added) Cantonese support - people are going to be quite reasonably upset if they've bought a Cantonese dictionary or Cantonese audio module from us and can't use it in flashcards, and without custom fields that's going to be rather awkward to offer.

But the primary goal of the update is making Pleco easier to use, so the biggest changes to flashcards will actually be in their configuration screens. Aside from that, about the only other big-ticket flashcard improvement we're hoping to include is sync support, which we're planning to do through our own servers (much like Anki): iCloud doesn't work very well / doesn't allow for cross-platform sync with Android / doesn't allow files to be uploaded / downloaded from a web browser, and Dropbox is not consistently accessible in China. We've pretty much got our system working now, but since we're kind of inexperienced at web services we're holding open the option to drop it at the last minute, or at least to call it a "beta" for a while.

The real exciting flashcard stuff is happening in the update after our next one - the goal there is basically to cross off every popular flashcard feature request we've had, stuff like auto-advancing audio flashcards with synthesized voice prompts and a brand new hyper-intelligent SRS algorithm that (we hope) will finally put to rest the problem of coming back after not reviewing for a few days and being confronted with 900 cards to study.

[putonghua73]

Thanks all. I bought the Pleco flashcard add-on yesterday (already bought female audio a long time ago), and am already GTD by going through the HSK 4 sample paper (again) and adding vocabulary from the HSK 4 list into Pleco, as I encounter new or poorly remembered words.

I find Pleco extremely easy to use, especially in conjunction with Goodreader (annotate and read PDFs, amongst many other documents). I haven't as yet added any custom examples sentences in the 'Definition' field (I will), as I wanted to GTD n terms of kick-starting improving my learning efficiency.

Cheers!

[mikelove]

Cool, thanks for your business.

FWIW, we're adding PDF support to Pleco's document reader in the next iOS update, so in a PDF with embedded Chinese characters you should be able to tap on words to look them up in the dictionary (or add them to flashcards). Actually, the library we licensed for this includes annotation support too (it's the same library that Dropbox and Evernote use), but we had not been planning to activate that in Pleco in the interests of avoiding clutter, so I'm interested to hear that you're using that - would you mind elaborating on what you use it for?

(no immediate plans to support that on Android, sadly - every good PDF reader library for Android has license terms designed around e-book publishers, so they all demand something silly like "10% of all of the money you make on Android" as a royalty - Apple builds code into iOS to do the heavy lifting of PDF decoding, so PDF support libraries on iOS are much easier to develop and therefore much cheaper)

[putonghua73]

Hi Mike,

I use Goodreader for annotating PDF documents - both for my professional work and study, as well as for my Chinese studies. My Chinese teacher provided me with a vocabulary list for HSK 4. She also provided me a learning tip which she used when she was studying English. She used a marker to mark a word, once she had learned it, to measure her progress. All I do is colour-code a word in the vocabulary list, once I have encountered it in text and added it as a flashcard.