Pleco replacing online dictionaries?

[hedwards]

It's worth noting for the OP that there are two packs available for Pleco, unless this has changed, there's the professional and there's the basic bundle. I'm not sure if it's possible to upgrade between the bundles without paying for the full price, but the basic has a ton of useful stuff in there as well and if you need one or two dictionaries, you can always buy them separately.

 

@Roddy, it's generally a bad idea to do all the ones you missed at the end of the session. The reason being that when we remember things we've done, we tend to remember the beginning and the ending more than the middle. The ending itself is where we tend to place most of the focus later on. So, if you're having a disproportionate amount of hard cards at the end and you're having a disproportionate amount of frustration at the end, it can easily taint future sessions by conditioning the student to start frustrated and hostile.

 

Like I said, that's a general thing and if it doesn't apply to you then just ignore the advice. But, frustration and anger are some of the bigger reasons why people don't see more progress.

[roddy]

While I think you've got me confused with someone else, I'll try and take on board the stuff about my frustration and anger. 

[hedwards]

Roddy, didn't you say this?

 

I hope this is configurable, because I like repeating the incorrect cards at the end of the test and not in the middle.

 

The point I was making was that it might well work for you to do the ones you got wrong at the end of the session, but it's good to pay attention to how that's working out. If you're being successful with minimal frustration, then it's likely useful. But, if you're like me, it winds up causing more frustration and lesser results as all the ones I've failed on get consolidated into a part of the session where I'm more likely to remember being frustrated.

[ouyangjun]

@Roddy - what platform do you use your Pleco on?  I use mine on iPhone.

 

The Hanyu Da Cidian does not have a demo option.  It is the dictionary found in Dictionaries --> Early Access --> Hanyu Da Cidian 

 

$59.99, over 350,000 entries.

 

If you click on Demo information it says "there is no demo available, and refers you to click to links below for samples", but there are no links below.

 

Possibly you're using a different platform (Android maybe)?  Or I'm doing something wrong, or we're talking about two different dictionaries...

[roddy]

Ha, totally my fault, didn't understand what was going on with the early access ones and was looking at the 古汉语大词典. Apologies. 

[gato]

I provided a few screenshots to compare Gudai Hanyu Da Cidian and Hanyu Da Cidian here:

http://www.plecoforums.com/threads/which-classical-chinese-dictionary-should-i-buy.4091/#post-33602

Which Classical Chinese dictionary should I buy?

[mikelove]

Regarding Hanyu Da Cidian on iOS: sorry about that; should be fixed now, go back into Add-ons and the demo should then be downloadable. (you might have to reload the catalog by pulling down somewhere in the list) We were futzing around with the catalog files recently (some light A/B testing plus the pending rollout of our new male text-to-speech add-on) and somehow the entry for HDC got rolled back to an old version with no download available.

 

@Basil - got it, thanks. Proper nouns definitely a weak point in the free dictionaries; CC-CEDICT does as well as it can, but their desire to keep their word selection (reasonably) well curated prevents them from adding the hundred thousand or so entries they'd need to offer robust coverage of foreign proper nouns. The 21C dictionary is our best current paid offering on that front if you're looking for English proper nouns.

 

Re inbred Apple accounts: we can't control the mapping of purchases to iTunes accounts, but if you simply write down your Registration ID you can reactivate them from that instead. They're a bit more limited than iTunes restores - the system will start giving you grief if you try to use the same ID on more than three devices at once - but if you find yourself in a situation where you need to use your iTunes purchase on more than three devices, contact us and we can give you additional IDs.

 

@laurenth - leech detection is in the works too, oddly enough that one has generated hardly any feature requests (you're the first in something like a year, I believe) but it's the sort of thing that we can silently enable in our default options to make people's experience better even if they don't realize it.

 

Regarding sentences, I'm not quite sure what you mean - they should be displayed now if you have a test with definition in "Show" and example display enabled in "Display." Do you want something like a cloze test, where we show you a single sentence with the flashcard word missing and you have to remember the word? Those are on our to-do list but we're still trying to work out the specifics (for example, do people have to add them manually or do we automatically fetch them from the dictionary when they add a card?)

[roddy]

"sorry about that; should be fixed now"

The Bluetooth monkey effect strikes again...

[SiMaKe]

@laurenth  re: leeches

 

Not sure what functionality you would like, but one possible approach that can be used now without Mike doing anything is to setup a separate "leech" profile using card filters such as the record filter "inlcude card if # incorrect > 15" and history filter "include card if not correct in row > 5". This at least identifies whatever you want to call a leech and then a test session can be disigned to work on them.

 

Just a thought. 

[Sun_Wu_Kong99]

Just bought the professional bundle off the website.  After a few minutes of use, I really have no regrets at all.  It's pretty sick.  Especially the Guifan dictionary, extremely helpful. 

 

Thanks for all the replies.  Now off for 5 months of dedicated intensive Chinese studying wooooo

[imron]

Roddy, didn't you say this?

No, that was me.

 

 

 

when we remember things we've done, we tend to remember the beginning and the ending more than the middle. The ending itself is where we tend to place most of the focus later on

By this logic, the end is the perfect place to have all the cards I got wrong.  I want to be focusing more effort on the cards I got wrong, therefore, if I'm going to be placing more focus at the end, then the end is the best place to do them.

 

There are a couple of other things I do that mitigate any frustration repeating incorrect cards at the end will cause.  Firstly, the number of incorrect cards is rarely a large number (can't give an exact figure but I'd say it never gets to double digits).  Secondly, when I get something wrong during reviews, I don't just flag it as wrong and move on to the next card, I stop and think about why I got it wrong, I analyse the characters in detail breaking them down to their component parts, I try to think about the context from where I learnt the word (I always learn words from context) and spend several seconds visualising everything clearly and cementing the word in my mind.  When I'm happy that I know the word well and am confident that I won't get it wrong again, only then will I move on to the next card.  It takes longer to review cards like this, but it means that I learn the words better and so I view it as a good use of time.

 

Now when the end of the review comes up, and the incorrect words are shown again for revision, it's more like a final jog of my memory to say, "hey remember how you got this word wrong, well don't do that again!" and then I repeat the above process of analysing the characters and thinking about why I got the word wrong and think about how next time I see this word I'm not going to get it wrong for that reason.

 

There's very little frustration and anger that goes on for me.  If you find this part causing you frustration, I would look at how you deal with incorrect cards and whether or not you are spending enough time thinking about why you got them wrong.

[Basil]

Mike,

 

Pleco's an incredible tool. Thanks for offering as much free stuff as you do.

 

& keep up the good work!

[laurenth]

@SiMaKe: Yes, I know more or less how to emulate a leech-killing function. I do that periodically to trim away frustrating cards from my SRS deck. What I was suggesting is a function that spots leeches on the fly during study sessions, that warns you that you are wasting your time with a given card and that you should do something about it (probably study it in a different way, concentrate more, or simply delete it).

 

 

@mikelove:

 

sentences (…) should be displayed now if you have a test with definition in "Show" and example display enabled in "Display."

 

 

I have both options enabled, but that's not what I mean. Here's an example. This morning, I came across the word 代理, looked it up (in GF with a little help from PLC, ABC and Co to understand the definition in full ) and added the card into a list for later studying. Now, when I will be studying, I would like the "front" card to show me only the examples of 代理 given in one or several dictionaries, not the "definition" (i.e. the translation, in C-E dictionaries) or anything else. Like a Cloze sentence… only, not Cloze'd, if you will.  For instance, with 代理, the front card would be:

 

GF: 局长职务暂时由老王代理。诉讼事宜由法律顾问代理。

PLC: 总经理病了，工作由他代理。代理厂长。

ABC:  我是代理秘书。

 

I ask this because I've always found it annoying to study words isolated from their biosphere.

[imron]

Moved question on cloze deletion and leeches here.

[Shelley]

Thank you imron for clearing that up.

 

If you are continually and consistently getting it wrong why would you want to remove it from your study list?

 

Wouldn't it be better for these cards to be flagged up at the end of study sessions so you can go away and concentrate on them.

 

Sorry if this has been said before.

[hedwards]

@imron, I'm not sure how I messed that up. I could have sworn there was a different username by that post. Sorry to Roddy for the misquote. I hope someday we get a proper quoting system.

 

Anyways, you've got the logic there wrong. For people with no emotional state at all that would probably work, but the amygdala draws its power before the upper brain functions do, which means that if you're putting the tricky ones towards the end of the session you're reinforcing the fact that you aren't getting them, and by doing that, you're also increasing the likelihood that you won't get them right then either as you've depleted a lot of the mental resources that you would be using to solve them. Ultimately you run the risk of conditioning yourself to find the sessions to be unpleasent and frustrating leading to more unpleasentness and frustration.

 

Ultimately, it really depends upon the individual, but as a general rule putting the words you're struggling with all together at the end of the session is something that should be avoided.

 

It's all about how you manage your sessions. Personally, I think it's better to engage in practices that rig things in favor of optimism and progress. I find that the old school and rather puritanical ideas that people used to employ to be a bad idea in most cases. That's not to say that I don't look for harder ways of doing them, but I don't just go with the hardest way I can find blindly without consideration for other factors. There's a very real difference between challenging your brain to produce more and torturing it into submission.

[mikelove]

@Basil - thanks!

 

@laurenth - so you're basically asking for a couple of Chinese-only example sentences by themselves (without Pinyin or English)? Interesting... almost the opposite of a cloze, actually, since instead of trying to guess the word from the (implied) meaning you're trying to guess the meaning from the word. Not sure if anyone's requested that before but it's a neat idea and shouldn't be too difficult to squeeze in with other example sentence improvements - thanks.

[laurenth]

Hello Mike, yes that's exactly what I mean: a pure "recognition" card where the learner has to produce the meaning(s) and the pronunciation(s). Some may say that such cards are somehow too easy compared with a front card showing a single word.

 

I'd say that they are much more realistic as, in real communication, a word almost never appears on its own, out of context.

 

Thanks to the context provided, it helps the learner to properly distinguish the multiple meanings, pronunciations and functions of a single word. 

 

Plus, it forces the learner to read more Chinese while reviewing and to see frequent collocations.

[imron]

For people with no emotional state at all that would probably work

I guess I have no emotional state then.  Like I said previously, reviewing incorrect cards doesn't make me frustrated or angry, instead I like the extra reminder of 'hey you forgot this card, make sure to remember it correctly next time'.

 

Personally, I think it's better to engage in practices that rig things in favor of optimism and progress

I prefer to engage in practices that favour rigour and identifying where the problem was and trying to make sure it doesn't happen again.  I find having a final review process helps me with that.

 

Ultimately, it really depends upon the individual, but as a general rule putting the words you're struggling with all together at the end of the session is something that should be avoided.

Like you said, it depends on the individual.  I've been experimenting with Chinese flashcards in one form or another since 2003 and am regularly assessing my study habits and looking at ways to improve them, and I'm pretty happy with the system I use and the results it produces for me.

[roddy]

Mike, during our London meet-up last night we came up with a feature request for you. We feel that wonderful though Pleco is, it fails to recreate the paper dictionary experience of spotting something interesting while you flick towards your target character and ending up getting completely distracted from whatever you were actually doing. 

 

Therefore we'd like to suggest a 'Surprise Me!' option, which when enabled will cause the dictionary to one time in ten (customisable, natch) send you to an entry randomly selected from the five pages (customisable, natch) adjacent to the word you were actually looking for.

 

We look forward to seeing this in the next update. Thank you.