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7. Tips and Tricks

lrorpilla edited this page May 7, 2023 · 7 revisions

This section serves to introduce users to any invaluable quality of life and productivity features that they may not be aware of.

Searching Outside The App

An OS-wide context menu option is added when you install jidoujisho. This means that wherever Android or other applications allow, when selecting text, jidoujisho may appear as an option. If you select this option, you will launch the app and it will search the text that you were selecting.

Sharing Text or Images To App

You may also select jidoujisho as an option when sharing text or images to other apps. Sharing text, in contrast to the context menu, will open the Card Creator and set your shared text as a sentence. Sharing an image will similarly allow you to use that image for export in the Card Creator.

Stashing Text

When selecting text in the app, users may notice a Stash option. This option is also available for dictionary entries through the Add to Stash quick action, which has a bookmark symbol.

Stashing will allow users to save a word or a specific text selection for later use in the Card Creator. When in the Card Creator, users may use the Open Stash enhancement to access the list of text that they have stashed so far. Users may also use the Pop from Stash enhancement to remove an item from the stash. This allows asynchronous mining of dictionary words or text, when a user would prefer to watch or read, and mine words later.

Recursive Look-ups

You may double-tap on words or characters on dictionary definitions. This will smart select the best search match for your currently selected target language. You may then select the option to search the word and open a recursive dictionary page.

This implementation ensures that users always get enough space to read recursive search results, and reduces unintentional look-ups or accidental closes of the dictionary overlay that occur on alternative workflows on mobile. This explicit gesture is also designed to give users a chance to try and understand before making too many impulse searches.

Monolingual Transition by Expanding and Collapsing Dictionaries

Users may decide to undergo a monolingual transition at some point in their studies. This involves getting used to reading dictionary definitions in their target language, or monolingual transitions, as opposed to bilingual definitions.

You may decide which dictionaries to expand or collapse by default by selecting dictionaries in the Dictionary Menu. This will make it so that definitions from certain dictionaries can be expanded and collapsed respectively. This is useful if you want to challenge yourself to read monolingual definitions before bilingual ones, by setting expanded dictionaries to exclusively monolingual, and using collapsed for bilingual dictionaries.

By editing your fields to use the Expanded Meaning and Collapsed Meaning rather than simply Meaning, you can extend and practice your monolingual transition in your exported flashcards as well.

Picking Specific Text

jidoujisho will automatically try to get a section of text for tapped text in a book and in other media sources. The app uses punctuation characters in order to identify the end of a sentence. Sometimes, a user may want a specific selection of text.

Users may use the Creator context menu option to instantly open the Card Creator with the selected text as the sentence.

Getting Example Sentences, Images and Audio

If a user has a word they would like to export but does not have an appropriate sentence from a media source, they can get example sentences from Massif, Tatoeba or ImmersionKit by using their respective User Enhancements.

This will allow users to pick an example sentence for a certain word from curated online collections of text. Similarly, users may use enhancements to get images and audio appropriate for the word they are exporting.

Sentence and Word Picking

If a paragraph of text is too long, users may use the Sentence Picker enhancement to limit the text to export to a certain sentence only. Similarly, users may pick a word from a sentence by use of the Text Segmentation enhancement. A dictionary search can then be performed from within the Card Creator in order to set the creator fields to be appropriate for a selected word.

Audiobook Mode

The transcript of a video's subtitles can be found by scrolling up or down in the video player. At the upper-right corner when the transcript is open, a button can be pressed which will toggle on Transcript Playback or Audiobook Mode. This will make it so that the player does not pause when the transcript is opened.

When this mode is enabled, users will have an extra play/pause button to control the video with the transcript still open. Users may also click on subtitles to seek to them without closing the transcript. This will

Listening Comprehension Mode

You may toggle this mode when playing videos. This will make it so that subtitles will only appear when you go back or forward 10 seconds, seek with the position and duration bar, or repeat the current subtitle. Users will also peruse the transcript should they need to.

This mode can be used if you want to hide subtitles and only reveal them if unsure and when you explicitly decide to recall what was said.

Wildcard Search

You can use ? or to search for a specific single character when searching with a search bar, such as in the Dictionary tab or when recursively searching. You can also use * or (こめ) to represent none or any number of characters.

  • For example, searching world?? can yield worldly. 自動? will include 自動車.
  • おは※います can yield おはようございます.

This can be useful when finding a very specific number of characters or when you know only the start and end of something, but have forgotten the middle, or vice-versa.

YouTube Videos, Channels and Comments

Users may share links from YouTube directly to the application instead of using search in the application. This will launch the application and start the YouTube video. If following a specific channels, users may long press on a video in their history and select Channel. This will show all recent videos for a channel.

Users may also read and look-up words in YouTube comments and replies by using one of the exclusive icons that appear in the bottom bar when watching a YouTube video in the app.