In praise of Pleco Reader!

[realmayo]

I know I'm at least a couple of years slow on this but:

 

I've used Pleco as a dictionary for years, most recently on a smartphone.

I never thought of using Pleco to read things on because the smartphone screen is small.

Pop-up-cursor dictionaries on computers are great but I have to spend all day staring at a computer screen, so the idea of going home and sitting in front of another computer to read a novel was a huge turn-off.

So, physical books -- but then it's time-consuming to look up characters and words and unless it's an easy book, there are lots of those.

 

Over the last year I've got used to reading (English) books on a Kindle, which I now love. I also ended up with a Nexus 7 tablet. Didn't really use Pleco on the tablet because it worked fine on my phone.

 

But over the weekend I discovered Pleco's reader. Started by opening an article on a webpage, pressed share, and the text transferred in Pleco. Then did the same with a chapter of a book I was reading which I knew was online too. Wow -- surged through that chapter and the next two. And no need to underline interesting words in order to go back and look them up and learn them, just save them there and then.

 

Pleco simply eliminates the hassle I've met reading Chinese. Having now saved the rest of those unread chapters, and another book too, I can sit down and get reading whenever and wherever with no faffing around. Always got something to read. Looking up words is instant. Can save any I want to learn. Feels like a game-changer for me -- wish I'd paid attention to people who mentioned it here earlier.

[Demonic_Duck]

I believe the free version of the reader will only open what you have in the clipboard (i.e. copied), but not e.g. text files. Not sure if it still has the "share with..." function that allows you to directly "open" copied text in it.

 

Worth mentioning that, whilst it's hard to argue with the usefulness of the reader, it's all too easy to allow it to become a "crutch" because it's too easy to look up unknown words with. Sure, you can add them quickly as flashcards, but ideally you want to make sure you've fully learned the word before doing that, which you won't do with a cursory glance.

 

Either way, it's certainly a highly useful tool.

[realmayo]

I agree about the crutch -- I'm trying to force myself to read ahead to the end of the sentence and guess what the meaning is before looking something up. Otherwise I find myself looking up words that I really should have and probably could have remembered with a teeny bit more effort.

 

Also I don't look up every unknown word, and that was of course the case when reading paper books, but it's reassuring to know that when an unknown word or phrase prevents me from understanding the sentence, or if I'm just curious, or I want to double-check, it's there at my fingertips.

 

So actually it's a good crutch -- a tool to help me read an hour or so of interesting Chinese at a time and really enjoy it -- rather than make me feel annoyed and irritable like before.

 

 

I use Anki rather than Pleco for flashcards, so the add-to-flashcards feature in Pleco is simply a means of storing them before emailing to my computer and entering into Anki. If there was a way to copy the sentence in which the saved-to-flashcards new word occurred too....

[roddy]

I've split the hardware question off to here, it's quite a distinct topic and we haven't had it asked for a while (this is one case where telling people to search for that topic from 2005 isn't really appropriate)

[mikelove]

@realmayo - Glad to hear it's helping! The 'good crutch' aspect has been a driving principle for us since the beginning, actually - same reason we push handwriting input, we're not trying to replace the process of actually learning to read Chinese but we want to enable people to work with native text earlier and with less frustration.

 

Sentences / context are a major focus for us going forward - our flashcard system is getting its biggest redesign since the Palm / WM days and there are all sorts of lovely things we can do when we're no longer worried that a 20MB flashcard database file will overtax somebody's flash memory :-) And they should certainly be exportable once we do support them.

 

@Demonic_Duck - free version on Android does support "share," yes - this also works with web pages, we don't offer live tap-lookup web reading like we do on iOS but if you share a web page with our reader it can usually extract the plaintext from the page and give you a reader session with that.

[imron]

If there was a way to copy the sentence in which the saved-to-flashcards new word occurred too....

I'm currently working on some software that allows you to extract sentences containing a given word from a text (both with and without cloze deletion) and export it for use in flashcard programs.  It's still not finished yet, but you can check it out here if you're interested (currently windows only).

[laurenth]

 

If there was a way to copy the sentence in which the saved-to-flashcards new word occurred too....

 

I do that almost systematically.

 

- Select the sentence

- Copy it to the clipboard (icon on the top, left corner)

- Select the word you wish to learn

- Create a flashcard ("+" icon)

- Click "+" again > Card Info > Convert to custom card

- After the word, or character I add a colon and paste the sentence, e.g. 人道主义：联合国、欧盟高官将叙利亚危机形容为“我们这个时代最为严重的人道主义悲剧” . The reason why I keep the headword separate is to keep the correct pinyin info in the pronunciation field.

- Save

 

It seems cumbersome, but it does not take more than 10 seconds.

 

Caveat 1: in my case, this only works with the CC or PLC dictionaries, not with ABC or, unfortunately, GF (ZH-ZH), maybe for copyright reasons (maybe mikelove can confirm this?)

Caveat 2: the punctuation is not always properly pasted (it's transformed into squares).

[laurenth]

About the "crutch" thing, you're definitely right and I've complained about it myself in other threads (including in the "aim and objective" thread).

 

At an intermediate level, it's too cumbersome to dive in an interesting dead tree book and look up every other word. On the other hand, you can use an electronic version, load it into Pleco (or other e-readers that support lookups; I also use MoonReader) and significantly lower the threshold at which you can start reading interesting native texts. However, I've had the impression that easy lookups also suppress the need to really know your vocab. After all, you can look up the same character 20 times effortlessly without noticing that there's a problem.

 

So, recently I've been using both a paper and an electronic version of the same books (electronic versions of many many Chinese books are available for free anyway): I use the paper version when I can, i.e. when I have some physical room and/or the text does not require too many lookups so I'm able to read the book more extensively; I use the e-version in cramped buses and metros and/or when the text is more difficult and/or I want to do more intensive reading. As you said, it's important to be disciplined about lookups and refrain from tapping the screen too fast. First, reading the context, thinking a bit harder, or maybe just waiting three seconds, sometimes makes you remember a meaning or a pronunciation that didn't come up instantly. Second, I've found that it pays off to stop and think about *why* a word or a character is confusing or forgotten.

 

I've also started using the GF dictionary more and more for my flashcards. Looking up difficult Chinese words in a Chinese-Chinese dictionary (as far as you can) is not a crutch, it's learning even more Chinese! Pleco is so magical that you can even tap unknown words in a ZH-ZH dictionary when studying, if necessary.

[realmayo]

Looks interesting Imron. None of the links work -- presumably that's part of "still not finished yet"?

 

laurenth, thanks for the hint about pasting. I'll give it a try. I'm guessing I'll find it too much of a distraction to do in most cases, but for ones where I really want the context it should work fine.

 

I'm not sure I'm too worried about looking up the same word over and over -- I think I'd realise after a while. Maybe every few weeks I should export the list of all the words I've looked up and run it through excel to see if there are any that come up lots of times.

 

Good point about ZH-ZH look-ups, yes at the end of the day they're just additional reading in Chinese. 

[laurenth]

 

I'm not sure I'm too worried about looking up the same word over and over -- I think I'd realise after a while.

 

In fact, Pleco also takes care of that: if you look up a word that you've already added to a list, the "Add" icon looks different (there's a dotted line around the "+"). When that happens, you definitely know that you should do something about that word: either studying it harder - or deleting it: your knowledge network may not be ready yet to assimilate that particular piece of information. 

[realmayo]

Ah yes, but I'm only adding words I want to learn in next day or so.

[imron]

None of the links work -- presumably that's part of "still not finished yet"?

Hmm that's definitely not what I meant. The website was fully functional last time I checked. Am on mobile at the moment, but will check it out as soon as I'm back at my computer.

[imron]

Should be working now.