Paper dictionaries?

[Phil Wareham]

That's certainly the best option if it works. Using anki on my phone to review things is invaluable, but switching to pleco to search for things is clumsy. Even to copy and paste...why doesn't pleco automatically paste in the clipboard into the search window? It's how the bulk of searches are made. If I knew it well enough to write it myself I generally wouldn't be looking it up.

 

One issue is that the vocabulary I'm learning is from a hsk 6 vocabulary book my teacher got me, not just words I come across in text. I can find them in the dictionary, but I need to be able to add the collocations, examples, synonyms, etc. I need to play with pleco and see if it can do this.

[mikelove]

We don't automatically paste in the clipboard by default because some people find that highly annoying - you can easily turn that on in Settings / Miscellaneous / Search clipboard on startup though.

 

As for customizing text, go to the card's page in Organize Cards and tap "Convert to custom card" and you can edit the card text however you like.

[laurenth]

 

 

My issue now is deciding whether to ditch anki, or how to integrate pleco and anki. 

 

 

After much hesitation, I finally ditched Anki a year ago and I have never regretted it. I was afraid I would miss the flexibility of Anki, e.g the possibility to create sentence cards, Cloze deletion cards, audio cards, image cards, video cards, etc.

 

But it's now possible to create sentence cards in Pleco, and Cloze deletion cards are supposed to be in the pipeline. I still miss the automatic leech detection offered by Anki, though.

 

On the other hand, Pleco is designed from the ground up for Chinese, and it has a reader, a dictionary and a flashcard program, all fully integrated. So unless you need Anki for very specific features (if you want to use sub2srs for instance), or to study other languages or subjects, Pleco is the clear winner.

 

There's another case where you'd better stick with Anki: that's if you don't own a smartphone, as Pleco does not run on a desktop computer. But I suppose you know that already.

 

[mikelove]

Clozes are coming, yes. So are embedded media and automatic leech detection, actually - we've been generally trying to move away from giant all-encompassing updates, but for flashcards it makes sense to group all of our major database changes to support these things together so that we only have to migrate people to a new format once.

[Demonic_Duck]

If I knew it well enough to write it myself I generally wouldn't be looking it up.

Just thought I'd point out that, whilst this may be true for you, it's not necessarily true for the bulk of pleco users. I'd say 70% of my searches are input with pinyin (knowing the pinyin is definitely not the same as knowing the word), 20% are input partly or fully using the handwriting feature, and the remaining 10% are copied from some source. This might be different if I did most of my reading from online sources, but even when I do that, I generally just copy and paste the full text into pleco reader instead.

[889]

Some of us just like books, and can't pass up a good dictionary at a good price.

 

Check out the used bookstores. They've always got lots of dictionaries, often only slightly used, including the afore-mentioned 汉英词典, which is far-and-away the best of the bunch.