studying German - with Pleco?

[li3wei1]

I'm taking a break from Chinese for a while to study German. I've been trying to do it without flashcards but I think it's time now. I want something easy to use on my Android phone, with SRS, and I don't mind putting some effort into creating the cards. Is there a way I can use Pleco, or are there any other apps people would recommend?

[Angelina]

Memorize strong and weak verbs, also, memorize the gender of nouns. 

[Zeppa]

The Goethe Institut does a free app for Android and iPhone, but I don't know what it's like. I don't need it because I lived in Germany for 30 years! But you have to be online to use it, apparently:

 

https://www.goethe.de/en/spr/ueb/vok.html

 

Here are some other suggestions. Sorry if you've already found them. But I don't think Pleco would be the right system:

 

http://www.fluentu.com/german/blog/best-apps-for-learning-german/

[Shelley]

I am only suggesting this because you are not using it for chinese, other wise it would be Pleco very time, Have you tried Anki? Personally I don't use/like it for chinese but I know lots of people really like it.

[Angelina]

You can make all kinds of charts for German, or use charts others have made, look up "German chart" on Google or Bing, image search. 

 

Can you make flashcards with these charts? Maybe use a phone with a bigger screen or tablet. 

 

[Lu]

There are all kinds of SRS programs. I like Anki, but you can look around what suits you best.

 

Pleco does have a Chinese-German dictionary, by the way. It'll probably still be a while before that gets useful to you, but in addition to being extensive and pretty good, it's also free.

[li3wei1]

Thanks everyone. I looked at the Goethe Institute app, but the reviews were horrible. They've got great stuff on their website, though. And thanks, Lu, for pointing out the German-Chi dictionaries on Pleco, I hadn't thought of that, but I'm not sure I want to be using both languages at the same time. I used Anki a long time ago for Chinese (before the new version that got everyone upset), and got a little carried away with it. I might try it again.

[mikelove]

FWIW, the new flashcard system (which we are actually really honest-to-goodness moving along well on) supports something a bit akin to Anki's multiple 'model' concept - multiple types of cards with multiple combinations of fields - and while we mostly designed that for accommodating phrases and sentences and grammatical notes and pronunciation systems (memorizing syllables) and other Chinese-related things that might not fit neatly into a Chinese-headword-oriented flashcard, in theory it should also allow for a very nicely formatted German card. But it wouldn't really offer you anything for that that you couldn't also get in Anki.

 

If you wanted to do German in Pleco now, the best way would be to set up "English-Chinese" flashcards - enable support for them in Settings - and then import a list of German words with:

 

German<tab>English

 

one item per line, making sure to choose English-Chinese as the import language in the import screen. To use those cards on a test you'd set the Card Language option to English-Chinese (in Test Settings on iOS, right on the main New Test screen on Android).