Pleco 2.0 Instruction Manual : Flashcard System Introduction
The flashcard system in Pleco 2.0 has seen more changes than any other part of the software; we've rewritten it from scratch, with a brand new, much more powerful database engine, many new testing modes, and a more flexible system for grouping / organizing cards. The following is a summary of the major changes and how to work with them.
See the 2.0 upgrade guide for instructions on how to convert your flashcards from 1.0 to 2.0 format.
In 1.0, each flashcard belonged to one and only one flashcard list; you could move and copy cards between lists, but an individual card could only belong to one list at a time. The problem with this was that if the same card appeared in multiple lists, each copy of the card would have its own separate set of statistics (rank, correct answer history, last reviewed date, frequency adjustment / repetition spacing info, etc); hence, the "ni hao" card in your "HSK" list wouldn't know that you'd just looked at the "ni hao" card in your "PCR" list, meaning you'd end up reviewing "ni hao" a lot more often than necessary.
In 2.0, instead of storing flashcards in lists you assign them to "Categories" - a single card can belong to an unlimited number of categories, so now you can have just one "ni hao" card that belongs to both "HSK" and "PCR." The 2.0 flashcard importer can automatically merge duplicated cards for you; just make sure the "Duplicate Entries" option in the import screen is set to "Merge Categories" and it will automatically combine those cards. (set it to "Allow" if you want it to keep those cards separate)
Categories can also be organized hierarchically, so you can group a bunch of them under a single parent category and only have to check one box to enable / disable all of those child categories in a flashcard session; this also saves you from having to scroll through a long list of categories to find the one you want.
Along with replacing Lists, Categories also replace 1.0's little-used Flags feature, so if you were using that to organize cards you can continue doing the same thing with categories in 2.0 (your flags will be transferred over as categories).
The one major disadvantage to the Category system is that due to technical limitations, it's not possible to specify an arbitrary sort order for cards in a category; the new "Manage Flashcards" screen (see below) lets you sort them in a variety of ways (creation date, headword, etc), but if you like to arrange cards in a particular order and test them in exactly that order you unfortunately won't be able to do that in 2.0. However, you can test cards in the order in which you created them by choosing "Fixed" card selection in the "General" tab of Advanced Settings.
The old "Edit List" screen from PlecoDict 1.0 has been replaced by an entirely new flashcard organization screen that looks like this:
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While the old screen was designed a bit like the Windows File Explorer or the Mac OS Finder, where you open up folders and move items between them, this new screen is designed to work more like a database search engine (e.g. in an online store); you search for a list of results and then do things with the items in that list. You can still move flashcards to different categories just like you did the old screen, but the interface for doing so is a bit different.
To list all of the cards in a particular category, choose "category" from the menu at the top left corner of the screen, select the category you want from the list next to it, and then tap on the search button at the top right corner of the screen to generate the list of cards.
To assign a card to a new category, choose that category from the popup list located directly BELOW the list of cards (just to the left of the eraser button). Then, tap on the green "plus" icon located to the left of that list to add the card to the selected category. The selection cursor will automatically move down to the next card, so you can quickly assign a bunch of cards to the same category this way. You can remove cards from a category by tapping on the red "minus" icon instead (located just to the right of the plus icon).
To delete a card, simply tap on the eraser icon located below the card list.
See the Manage Flashcards section of the reference manual for more information on this screen, including how to adjust the sort order for search results and how to perform batch operations (like adding all of the cards in the search results to a particular category).
To create, delete, or rename categories, go to the Manage Categories screen - this works similarly to the Manage Lists screen in 1.0, with the biggest addition being a new "Group" option to let you group categories under other categories (making categories more organized). To group a category under another category, tap on the category you want to group, then on the Group button, then on the category you want to group it under. The "Move" button lets you put a category next to another category at the same depth, useful for quickly moving categories around in a long list - highlight a category, tap the Move button, then tap on another category and the first category will be inserted directly below the second category in the list. The "Split" option lets you easily break up a large category (e.g. an HSK vocabulary list) into manageable-sized pieces by splitting it into multiple categories (which are then grouped under the original category). The "Default" setting lets you choose a default category to which new cards are assigned (as with the Make Default button in 1.0).
The new Statistics screen lets you easily count the number of cards in a specific category (as with the old Properties screen), but also gives you a lot of other information like average card score, score ranges, number of cards successfully learned, etc. If you've been using Pleco flashcards for a long time, the "All" option in the Statistics screen can be particularly enlightening since its "Total Repetitions" count will tell you the total number of cards you've looked at since you started using Pleco - we've seen people with counts as high as 300,000, equivalent to studying 400 cards a day every day for two whole years.
The Reset Ranks / Clear Statistics options have been moved to the Batch Commands screen under Manage Flashcards.
Pleco 2.0 supports both the old text-based flashcard format from 1.0, and a new, XML-based format that includes additional data like card statistics, creation dates, and the IDs of linked dictionary entries. Most of the Pleco flashcard lists floating around are still in the old text format, and you can still export cards to that format in order to share flashcard lists with PlecoDict 1.0 users; we work around the fact that cards can belong to multiple categories but only one list by outputting the same card multiple times (so you'd see it under each category that it beings to). We use the XML format in files generated by the 1.0-to-2.0 Flashcard Converter utility so that it can preserve your rank / history / dictionary entry data when you import the cards into 2.0.
The Import screen has had several new options added, the most important of which is "Duplicate Entries" - this lets you control whether duplicated cards are skipped, merged (their categories are added to the existing card), or allowed. The "Ambiguous Entries" option can also be handy - if you set it to "Prompt" it will let you select the correct dictionary entry if a given card maps to more than one. There's also now the option to choose which dictionaries are used in card imports (particularly useful now that we have a Chinese-Chinese dictionary, which some people may prefer not to use in flashcards), and a much-requested "Undo" button to easily reverse an incorrect / unwanted import.
The Export screen has been less heavily upgraded, but now includes an option to remap cards in paid dictionaries to free ones as it exports them; this means that you can now export a flashcard list with a complete (or nearly complete) set of definitions, whereas before the definitions would be missing for any card which linked to an ABC/Oxford dictionary entry. There's also now an option to export only your user dictionary entries, helpful if you want to get those out of Pleco without having to create flashcards for all of them.
Flashcard session settings (which categories to test on, how many cards, test mode, etc) are now stored in flashcard "Profiles." Using profiles, you easily switch between different sets of settings without having to manually go in and change the options in all of the configuration screens.
To create a new profile, tap on the Manage button at the top right corner of the main "Pleco Flashcards" screen to go to the Manage Profiles screen. Once you've created a profile, select it from the list at the top of the screen; any settings changes you make will then be saved in that profile. You can use that same list to switch to a different profile before starting a session.
Along with the new Profiles system, we've also added several brand new test modes - multiple-choice tests, free-answer tests (handwrite the characters or type the Pinyin for a card), tone practice tests (we give you the Pinyin and you supply the tones), and stroke order tests (tap on the character's strokes in the correct order). All of these are selectable in the New Session screen.
Almost all of the options in the old Rank / Test / Card Settings are still available, they're just in different places:
The Rank Settings options are now in the Scoring tab of Advanced settings - Ranks have been replaced in 2.0 by "Scores" (see Scoring/Ranks below).
The Test Settings options are now divided between several different screens. The testing mode and fields options are now in the Test Setup tab of the New Session screen. The "Reveal fields separately" and "Show sketch box" options are now in the Modes tab of Advanced Settings, the font size and "Extra info" options are in the Display tab, and for "Don't record answers," go to the Scoring tab and set the scoring type to "None." To switch between fixed and rank- (now score-) based "Display fields," set "Subject Selection" to "Score-based" in the General tab of Advanced Settings - after that, the Test Setup tab will let you assign different fields to different ranges of scores.
Most of the Card Settings options are now in the Card Filter tab of the New Session screen - you can go there to limit the cards in a session by score, number of times reviewed, last answer correct/incorrect, and created/reviewed time. There's also an option there to require that cards be in / not in a particular category (in addition to being in one of the categories selected for the session), mimicking the "Require flags" option. The mode and frequency/repetition-spacing settings have been restructured a bit; you now select the number of cards to review (including "All" and "Endless") in the Test Setup tab of New Session, and to switch between frequency-adjusted, repetition-spaced and randomly-chosen cards, go to the General tab of Advanced Settings and select the appropriate option under "Card Selection."
In 2.0, we've replaced the old system of flashcard "Ranks" with numerical "Scores." Flashcard scores are directly proportional to how often cards appear in tests; a card with a score of 200 would appear half as often in frequency-adjusted tests as a card with a score of 100, and in repetition-spaced tests the score-200 card would only be reviewed once every two days while the score-100 card would be reviewed every day. We think this is a more intuitive / easy-to-understand system than Ranks, and it also allows us to add a much-requested new feature, Automated flashcard scoring.
Automated scoring behaves a bit like the popular flashcard study systems SuperMemo and Mnemosyne; after each correct or incorrect answer, it recalculates the card's "difficulty factor," and uses that to determine how much to change the card's score by. Hence, cards that you have a harder time remembering will see their scores increase more slowly than cards that you remember easily. Unlike their systems, however, ours has a customizable "Aggressiveness" setting, so if you find that scores are increasing too slowly (or too quickly) you can change that setting to make them increase at a more appropriate speed.
You can configure card scoring in the Scoring tab of Advanced Settings. Along with the Automated system, there's also a "Manual" one which lets you configure scores to increase / decrease after a certain number of correct / incorrect answers (as in 1.0).
In 1.0, all of the data for a particular flashcard was embedded in a single database record, and that record consisted of nothing but the card's statistics and the ID of the dictionary entry it linked to. In 2.0, we've made two important changes to the way flashcard data is stored.
The first change is that flashcard records now include the flashcard's headword and pronunciation; for custom cards (i.e. cards that don't link to a built-in dictionary entry), they also include the definition, so you no longer need to fiddle around with user dictionaries in order to create custom cards. Storing this information in the database also makes it possible to temporarily use a different dictionary for flashcard definitions, to permanently remap flashcards to a different dictionary, and to search for cards based on their headword / pronunciation, and also means that our duplicate card filter now works even if the cards link to entries from different dictionaries. It does make the flashcard database significantly larger, however.
The second change is that instead of being stored in the card, flashcard statistics (last reviewed time, score, difficulty, history, etc) are now stored in a separate "scorefile." You can create more than one scorefile, and choose which scorefile a particular session will use for repetition spacing / frequency adjustment / recording answers. This means that it's now possible to track flashcard scores differently for different types of test. For example, you could set up one scorefile for studying characters and another for studying Pinyin; that way, if you had an easy time remembering the Pinyin for a particular card but a difficult time remembering the characters, the card would show up less often in Pinyin tests but more often in character ones.
The biggest change of all, though, is that flashcards are now stored as SQLite databases instead of using a proprietary Pleco format. This makes them much less likely to become corrupted, since SQLite uses a sophisticated technique called "journaling" to keep files from becoming corrupted / inconsistent when a system crashes, and also enables us to add a lot of powerful new features; many of the new options in 2.0 are just the tip of the iceberg for what we can do with SQLite.
One other consequence of using SQLite, however, is that due to limitations in the internal memory systems on many recent Palm OS handhelds (those running Palm OS 5.4, i.e. the Tungsten E2, T5, TX, Centro, and Treos other than the Treo 600) we have to store flashcard databases on those in a special hidden internal flash memory instead of storing them as regular Palm databases. You can copy / back up flashcard databases stored there with our handy PlecoMover utility, though - see the installation manual for instructions on how to back up those files. Windows Mobile handhelds have no such limitations, in fact SQLite is a considerably better fit for their file storage system than our old database format was.
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