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Flash card suggestion

Something that would make Flashcards significantly more useful for me and, I suspect, other users OULDER be the ability add the sentences from the expansion section of the lessons. It would help us learn to recognize words and phrases in context.

Thank you for your suggestion. Let me make sure I understand. Are you suggesting that we add sentences to the flash cards or additional vocabulary words from the expanded section so you can see them in your vocabulary manager? Please advise.

I’m not sure if this is exactly what he means, but what would be great would be cloze-style sentence cards, like:

Front side:
他一看见我就走,__跟我想的一样,很讨厌我.
Back side:
果然
他一看见我就走,果然跟我想的一样,很讨厌我.

I usually end up making these in Anki.

Hello! I want to make sure I am on the page as you, so would you like an option to create your own flashcards outside of the vocabulary section? And have the ability to have Chinese on both sides? Let me know! Thanks.

I’m not too picky about the details of how it would be implemented (and I’m not sure how much you guys really want to invest in the flash card system anyways). But in an ideal world, here is my vision:

  1. In the expansion sentence part of each lesson, add a way to select sentences and “add to deck” just like in the vocabulary section of each lesson. Somehow in the code it should tag the vocabulary word for the expansion sentence, or let you pick a word in the sentence to tag.

  2. Add a second section to the main vocabulary page called “sentences” which is structured basically the same as the vocabulary section but shows both the sentence and the vocab word. Something like:
    (Word in Chinese), (Word in Pinyin), (Word in English), (word translation)
    (Sentence in Chinese), (Sentence in Pinyin), (Sentence in English), (Sentence translation)

  3. Then when you click “flashcards”, along with the usual flashcard options, it will have a “cloze” option ( or some other word, I don’t know if “cloze” is a copyrighted word) where it’ll show you the kind of card I mentioned above: on the front it shows you the sentence with the tagged vocabulary word blanked out, you guess the blanked out word, and on the back it shows you the full sentence, with the vocabulary word above it, or maybe in bold face in the backside sentence, or both.

Now, if you wanted to really go above and beyond and possibly convince me to abandon using Anki for Chinese altogether you would want to:

  1. Add in a spaced repetition system to the flashcard decks

  2. Add in a flashcard quiz section to the mobile app

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Hello Colin, I will pass this on to our development department and see what we can do! Thanks for your suggestion.

Thanks for following up.

Here’s an example of what I mean. If you go to the elementary lesson “Asking Directions to the Toilet” there are two sections called “Expansion” and “Grammar”. Each one consists of a series of Chinese sentences, the audio, and the English translations. If we could add these sentences to our flashcards it would be helpful. In the vocabulary section you can select each word to add to the flashcards, but it would be good to have a flashcard with the entire sentence. It would really help to learn to identify the words in context.

Another useful feature would be the ability to have the audio autoplay without having to hit the button (this should be an option and not the default). I want to work on understanding the words and the sentences as they are spoken, but it is hard to play the audio without also accidentally seeing the characters.

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Awesome! Seems like you and Colin have somewhat of a similar desire. I will see what we can do about adding sentences to flashcards and having more flexibility in what you can quiz yourself on. I will also pass along the audio autoplay suggestion to our development department. Thank you!

My suggestion (as discussed in detail in NewPodMovement >>> General Discussion):
Make the example sentences available for download, most preferably in Anki-format.

Front: English Audio
Back: Chinese Audio + Hanzi + Pinyin

I have been doing it this way for a few weeks and I am already seeing very substantial results, especially in new words available for active application in daily use. For now, I record the English audio by myself, then add the downloaded Chinese audio and copy-paste the Hanzi and Pinyin.

This is extremely time-consuming, but worth it. If Chinesepod could provide set of audio flashcards for download and import into Anki with every lesson, that would be really, really awesome.

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Love it! Flashcards were and are so essential for me when I study. I will pass this on! Thank you MisterXia.