C-C entries for flashcards?

[icebear]

Recently I've been moving more towards using Chinese-Chinese entries for flashcards in Pleco. Was interested in hearing who else does this, and/or thoughts on why it is or isn't worthwhile. My brief views below...

Advantages:

• Usually include Chinese synonyms, which can help a lot with making the new word stick
  
• Example sentences in most definitions
  
• Reinforcement of plenty of other Chinese characters and words
  

Disadvantages:

• Some definitions can be very thick, end up having to switch to an English dictionary anyway
  
• Risk of relying too much on easier synonyms and not learning differences between similar words
  
• More time consuming in flashcards because I find myself reading the whole definition for each card, even easier ones that I definitely know (out of curiosity for how its defined).
  

[imron]

I've been using C-C dictionaries for years, first with a paper dictionary and later with Pleco, and it's by far my preferred way to look up words. Once you've done it for a while, you'll never go back to using English definitions if there is a Chinese definition available - the Chinese language is just so much more precise at defining Chinese words.

Also, I find the Guifan C-C dictionary that you can get with Pleco to be really good for learners because it often includes notes regarding the difference between two similar words, which mitigates your 2nd disadvantage to some degree.

Regarding the other disadvantages you mentioned, the first one is really only an issue in the beginning and the more you do it, the less this will be a problem. For the third one, this is actually an advantage, in that you are learning how the word is used and also practising all the other words in the definition.

[querido]

I don't put the definition anywhere; I have a cloze delete sentence or whole passage with enough context on the front, and the hanzi and pinyin on the back. If I can produce that there seems to be practically no chance that can't remember what it means.

I'm taking all of my new words from a fixed curriculum at this time, CSLPod Intermediate. So, my flashcarding time is spent reading from these lessons, and reading sentences that call to mind the whole lessons, instead of from definitions.

I'm also cheating the algorithm heavily in that I can see the other words I'm studying as I go; this is the least of my worries! I also read these lessons as scrolling lyrics in foobar; please, let no one advise against that for the sake of the algorithm! I resolve the problem of unjustified promotion (because I might have seen the word on a previous card) by setting a maximum interval limit.

[Lanchong]

One disadvantage you didn't mention is that some words are much easier to grasp if you just know the English definition. For example, fruits and animals. Knowing that 番茄 is an edible red fruit originating in the Americas is all and good, but it's simpler if you just tell me it means 'tomato'.

[icebear]

querido - I've though of doing similar in the past. Never got around to it because back then I found Anki too cumbersome to set up the whole cloze sentence system, and flashcard maintenance is my bane. Once it gets relatively automated in Pleco (I think this is planned, eventually) I'll probably revisit.

[mikelove]

Sentence flashcards are planned, yes, both cloze sentences and "here's a Chinese sentence, what's the translation?" ones. It's mainly been a matter of obtaining (or generating in-house) semantically-tagged versions of all of our dictionary databases - this part's an example sentence, this part's the Pinyin for that example sentence, this part's a definition, etc. Plus, particularly important for the cloze feature, making sure that we know exactly which characters should replace the ~, since some dictionaries are rather loose about that and you can't just auto-insert the headword in every case.

But that's almost done now - biggest remaining straggler is Guifan, in fact, since it took us a *long* time to come to terms with them on a deal for the 2nd edition. (finally signed that and sent the publisher a rather large wire transfer last week, though thanks to 春节 it might be a few more weeks until we actually get our hands on the data files)

[querido]

Icebear, thanks for your reply.

I used Chinese Word Extractor to create all of the cards for CSLPod Intermediate and I just unsuspend them as I go.

I fed it a list of all the words in CSLPod Elementary, to exclude, and a text of all of the Intermediate lesson dialogues.

It produced a tab separated text file with some additional columns.

I think I remember having to adjust this file a little before importation; for example, since it didn't use "[......]" to indicate the deletion I used "find and replace all" to change that.

I adjusted some, for example when the unknown word appeared more than once in the sentence or fragment, or to extend it to provide more context. And, as you might expect, it sometimes flagged as a word some juxtaposition of two characters that was not being used as that word in that case. I just delete those. I find these and correct them as I unsuspended them.

By the way, in other decks I have whole lessons scheduled for review, with a maximum interval limit. Here I'm not expecting the flashcarding theory to work right; to me it's just a review scheduler, and it works great.

Edit: I'm sorry I didn't notice the word "pleco" in the original post. The previous post was made while I was writing this.

[imron]

@querido it sounds like you've got a good strategy going. I wouldn't worry about 'cheating' the algorithm by seeing words sooner in context. Presumably the whole point of flashcarding is so that you can read Chinese, not to build up a list of words that you're only allowed to look at at specific intervals.

[querido]

Thank you imron.

Right.

[icebear]

Thanks for the tips querido. It does sound pretty approachable the way you describe it, but as I mentioned I'm terribly lazy about flashcard maintenance. Looking forward to the feature being added to Pleco, and hoping it's very straightforward/intuitive!