We are excited to announce that we have released a new feature on Pandanese. The long-awaited and highly demanded “SYNONYMS FEATURE” is finally here!!
Here is a short look at how you can use this feature:
The Synonym Feature is a feature where you can add your own custom answers to words or custom mnemonics that you want to write down to better help remember the characters, their sounds, and meanings.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask here or contact us via the chatbox in the dashboard or main page here!
Hi @PandaneseSupport. Thank you for implementing this feature I believe it will help the community a ton. I do have a question about implementing it for cards I have already done. i.e. I tried looking up a random character (这 in this case) to add my own mnemonic from the Accuracy tab and I could not find the ‘Add to Card’ button anywhere on my screen. Is this feature still waiting to be implemented or is it only available when you see a card for the first time?
As far as I can see, I can do it on cards I have ready for review and new cards to learn, so far. So you might have to wait for a card to come around for a review again to edit the meaning if the one you’re trying to edit hasn’t been seen in a while.
@PandaneseSupport This is something I’ve been waiting to see added to Pandanese for a while so thanks so much for this.
I thought I’d try some things out, though, and I did run into an issue though where I learned a new card and added a custom definition. Then, during the portion where you answer what the definition is, I changed my custom definition. But the card didn’t seem to remember the new custom definition - only the previous one. I’ll have to try it again when the card pops back up but I thought I’d let you guys know for now in case there is something wrong with the way this should work.
EDIT: After some further testing, it looks like the custom definitions are not saving during a review session. So if I get the card for “球员” and add a custom definition of “ball player” while answering the reading, when it comes time to answer the definition during that same session, it doesn’t seem to have saved that custom definition. When I click “add to card” to check, the custom definition will be blank even though I had added a custom definition already.
Thank you for responding to our post! @trey_pubins This feature has been implemented but is currently only available for cards in review or learned the first time. We will also consider your input on putting the feature in the card section of the dashboard.
@arkh Thank you for giving this feature a try. We’ll look into the issue and see what’s going on in the backend.
@PandaneseSupport Thank you for the reply. I also want to confirm I have faced the same issues with my previous review session as @arkh noted in their thread. I used a section to note the difference between simplified and traditional characters (my basis for usage is in areas with heavy traditional character application) and I wanted to have the traditional variant in my card to compare. But after finishing the review I went to check on my cards and all the characters I had just inputted were gone.
Thank you for your patience and support for Pandanese. There is an additional explanation that we would like to give to help gain a better understanding of how this feature works.
If the custom answers and explanations were added during the review session (normal review sessions and review session right after learning), the changes will be available during the next review session.
If the custom answers and explanations were added during your learning session, they will take into effect immediately.
We hope this clears out the questions regarding the changes not taken into effect.
We would love to hear more thoughts about this feature and if there is anything we can do to improve.
Just want to give an update after using the feature for a little bit now:
I’ve definitely noticed a lot of cards are easier to answer now since I’ve been changing any weird definitions or readings to ones that make more sense for me or for what they should be. So my overall time on Pandanese has been a lot less frustrating and I feel like I can make a lot more headway in a large stack of reviews quickly when I’m not pausing to remember a specifically-worded definition.
So yeah, a very welcome feature and I’m so glad we’ve got it in Pandanese now. Thank you for continuing to develop the site. Pandanese’s method of building up your characters and vocabulary list from the fundamentals has, honestly out of all the other courses and apps I use, been the most helpful towards furthering my list of Chinese words that I know. It’s frustrating that a lot of other sites/apps will teach you something like “参赛” but won’t have taught you what “参” and “赛” mean individually first.
The main problem for me has always just been with the definitions and readings that Pandanese has for some cards so this new feature mostly fixes that. It would of course, still be nice to have the base definitions and readings gone back over to make sure everything is correct, though, so that users aren’t getting them wrong on the first time learning them. Even if these can now be somewhat user-corrected now, discovering that you have to enter, for example, “variant of 記錄|记录[ji4 lu4] (but in Taiwan, not for the verb sense “to record”)” to get a definition right is always going to be frustrating when learning a card for the first time.
Apart from that, I think just some more communication in terms of updates, the state of Pandanese, or what the Pandanese team is working on would be great and would help to keep users satisfied with things.
Hello Arkh,
I’m Stephanie from Pandanese! I was browsing through our forum and came across your gem of a comment. It is unfortunate we missed this the first time around but don’t worry, we’re working on ways to improve our communication lines and grow this forum to better service you.
That is why feedback like yours is truly helpful in our efforts to improve Pandanese. We want to thank you for updating and sharing your experience. We’re delighted to know that you have experienced a positive change in your learning journey! We’re always working on ways to grow and improve our service. We’ll certainly take into account your suggestions for our next updates.
We’re actually working on a few things in our pipeline too! Hope you can stay tuned for our future product improvements. We’re also working on keeping you guys more updated here on the forum.
We’re looking forward to growing our Pandanese community and we’re thankful to have you on this journey with us!
I want to add that this feature is amazing!! A year ago I was really discouraged from using Pandanese because of the frustrating experience of getting a card “wrong” even though you entered a correct definition. Now I’m happily making my way through my ~2000 review backlog, down to ~1400 so far. Looking forward to learning new cards!
I think the Synonym feature presents an excellent opportunity for Pandanese to improve the quality of your cards. Simply look at the corrections existing users have made, and adopt the ones that look good. If multiple users have corrected the same card it’s likely there is a problem, and probably worth looking at that card and adopting the common suggestion.
Because the suggestions and problematic cards are automatically identified for you, this would greatly lighten your workload.
In my opinion card correctness is the single most important feature to me, so would be great if a program like this could happen. Or you could implement a feature which shows Users changes that other users have made to their cards, so you could pick from the popular synonyms. This is similar to what LingQ does, which works well.
Thank you so much for your amazing feedback!! We’re so glad to hear that your experience with Pandanese improved with our new feature. We’re always looking for ways to improve Pandanese so hearing it first hand directly from the user is great!
Definitely, we’re working on improving our problematic cards and your suggestion is definitely a good idea! I’ll take this up with the team and see how we can incorporate this to our product.
Again, thank you for taking the time. Always so delightful hearing from our student’s experience!
