Using ChinesePod Vocabulary with Pleco

ChinesePod’s new export functionality supports Pleco software. I’ve worked closely with Pleco founder Michael Love to assure the best possible results for exported vocabulary data, and Michael has agreed to give some tips to ChinesePod users on using their vocabulary with Pleco. And now I hand the post over to “Mr. Pleco” himself… –John

Michael Love from Pleco here, with some instructions and tips on importing ChinesePod flashcard export files into the old and new versions of our portable Chinese dictionary software. Thanks to John, Ken, et al for providing this wonderful new resource for Pleco (and ChinesePod) users.

Since the procedures for each platform / version vary significantly, I’ll break this down for each of them and then go into some (2.0-only) general tips for how to work with cards after you’ve imported them.

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Windows Mobile: Pleco 2.0

The easiest way to copy a file to a Windows Mobile handheld is to connect it to your computer, open up My Computer, and open up the icon for your handheld. That will let you access the files on your handheld just like those on a flash drive or other external disk. On Windows XP, you should see a “Personal” folder inside of there – copy the ChinesePod flashcard file into that folder. On Windows Vista, open up the \ icon, then “My Documents,” then “Personal,” and copy your ChinesePod flashcard file into there.

Alternatively, you can just run the Pleco installer program and choose the “Install Add-on” option in the first screen – that will copy the file to your handheld’s memory for you.

Once you’ve copied the file over, launch Pleco, choose “Open Flashcards” from the “Modules” menu, tap “Import,” tap “Choose File,” make sure “XML” is selected next to “Type” and “All Folders” is selected next to “Folder,” and tap on the ChinesePod flashcard file to select it. Then just tap the “Start” button to begin importing.

Windows Mobile: PlecoDict 1.0

Copy the flashcard file to your “Personal” folder as above, then open up PlecoDict, select “Manage Lists” from the “Flashcards” menu, select the “Import” tab, make sure “UTF-8″ is selected as the “Text encoding,” and tap on “Select File and Import…”. Make sure “All Folders” is selected next to “Folder,” and tap on the ChinesePod flashcard file to import it.

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Palm OS: Pleco 2.0

Important note / reminder for Pleco 2.0 users on Palm: unlike in 1.0, your flashcards are *not* automatically backed up when you sync your Palm with your computer, so see this page for instructions on how to back them up (unfortunately it’s not technically feasible to get those backups working automatically in 2.0).

If you have an SD card reader for your computer, the easiest way to install a flashcard file to your Palm is simply to copy it to that card – put the card in your computer, copy the flashcard file to the top / root directory of the card, then insert the card back into your Palm.

If you don’t have one of those, open up Palm Desktop on your computer, click on the “Install Tool” or “Quick Install” button on the left side of the screen (or on Mac OS, select “Install Handheld Files” from the “HotSync” menu), then just drag and drop the flashcard file onto that screen (the “Expansion Card” section in Quick Install). After that, sync your Palm with your desktop and the file should copy over.

Once you’ve copied the file over, run Pleco, choose “Open Flashcards” from the “Modules” menu, tap “Import,” choose “XML File (Card)” from the “Source” menu, and select your ChinesePod flashcard file from the file list. Click “Start” to import the file.

Palm OS: PlecoDict 1.0

If you have an SD card reader for your computer, you can just copy the flashcard file to that card as with 2.0. Otherwise, you’ll need to convert it into “PalmDoc” format to get it onto your Palm.

You can do that conversion on Windows with the free MakeDocW utility – download / run that software, go to the “Advanced” tab and make sure “Ignore Single-Line Breaks” and “Tabs -> Line Breaks” are both un-checked, go to the “Line Breaks” tab and make sure both options are set to “None,” then go to the Conversion tab, click the Browse button, and select the text file you want to convert. Enter the name you want the file to have on your Palm in the “Title” field, then click the Convert button to convert the document to PalmDoc format. (a similar free utility for Mac OS X is Palm Doc Converter)

Double-click on the resulting file to queue it up to install to your Palm, then HotSync your Palm with your desktop to copy the file over.

Once you’ve copied over the file, open Pleco, choose “Manage Lists” from the “Flashcards” menu, tap on the “Import” button, choose “PalmDoc” from the “From” menu and “UTF-8″ from the “Encoding” menu, select the converted flashcard list and tap “Import” to import it into Pleco. If you installed the file to an SD card, choose “Text File” from the “From” menu instead of PalmDoc, and enter the file’s name in the “File Path” field.

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General Tips (Pleco 2.0)

To test yourself on your newly-imported ChinesePod vocabulary, tap on the “New Flashcard Session” button in the main flashcard screen, go to the “Categories” tab, check the “ChinesePod” box (and uncheck all of the other boxes), then go back to the “Test Setup” tab and tap “Start Session.” You can also customize this by choosing alternate test types (multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blanks, etc) / card selection systems (SRS like Anki or a more self-directed system) / etc – see the instruction manual for more on that, or the flashcards tutorial for a shorter walkthrough.

After you’ve imported the cards, by default they’ll contain the same definitions / Pinyin transliterations / etc that they had on the ChinesePod website. If you’d like to switch them over to using definitions from the ABC or other Pleco dictionaries, go into the “Manage Flashcards” screen, select “category” from the menu at the top left corner of the screen and “ChinesePod” from the menu next to it, tap on the search button, then tap on the “Batch” button at the bottom of the screen. Choose the dictionary you want to remap cards to from the menu next to “Remap to dict,” then tap on that “Remap to dict” button to begin remapping cards. Any cards that aren’t covered by the selected dictionary will continue to use the definitions from ChinesePod.

With the new Pleco 2.0.2 update (now in public beta-testing in our discussion forums), we’ve added the option to skip that extra step and link the cards to dictionary entries as they’re being imported. To use that option, before starting an import, tap on the “Dicts” button at the bottom of the Import screen and select “Prefer Dicts” from the “Definition Source” menu.

Remapping cards to dictionary entries has the added advantage of cleaning up their traditional / simplified characters, since Pleco will automatically correct them using the information in its dictionaries, so if you’re concerned about character set support this is definitely something we’d recommend – you can easily toggle between simplified and traditional characters in Pleco to practice with whichever set you prefer.

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So that’s a basic guide for using ChinesePod flashcards in Pleco. Any questions / feedback are welcome – you can write me at mikelove@pleco.com, post a message in our discussion forums or just comment on this blog post.

Best wishes,

Michael Love
Pleco Software
www.pleco.com

Tagged as: pleco, vocabulary