tagainijisho
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Gnurou
No way to find all verbs, or other large part-of-speech catergory
I figured I could do a simple search for all the verbs I am learning. This turns out not to be possible! There are many different kinds of verbs listed under parts of speech, but not just "verb". And of course, selecting all of the different kinds does a search for words that are all of them, which is not the desired result. It would be nice to have a way to search for all nouns, adjectives, adverbs. I know the parts of speech are somewhat different from English, but there is some general similarity in semantics.
Indeed; and actually it would also be nice if the POS menu could be divided into some sub-menus. Since the POS can change across JMdict versions, this is not that easy, but I will give it a try sometime.
I think it might be easier to turn the pop-up menus into buttons for each vocabulary category. The button would open a modal window with checkboxes, so the user can select the exact items wanted instead of having to reopen the menu and scroll multiple times. A clear button on that window might also be a good idea.
As for combining logic, I'd say most people might expect choices under each category (part of speech, dialect, field, misc) would use "any match" (boolean OR) logic, while choices across categories would use "all match" (boolean AND) logic. That way you could find all verbs as well as adjectives, occurring in two particular dialects, relating to food, and used by women, for example.
It's a bit of a shame that the parts of speech can change under the app, but I expect the larger grammatical categories such as verb, noun, adjective can be collected without much fuss—even though Japanese blurs the lines between verb and adjective as most European languages understand them!
Your proposal sounds good, but wouldn't that make a lot of buttons in the interface? Not to mention that some ought to be organized hierarchically... Do you have an idea for how to address this?
The easiest thing would be a tree like the lists. You can click any element and it selects everything under it. You can even deselect lower elements, but that would require more code.
Worst case scenario you can make a new filter that gives you the raw SQL statement, which you can change and store in the Saved Searches menu. That menu already has a hierarchy, it can be reused. It would be easier to just distribute by the default certain searches that correspond to that. After all, boolean logic is an advanced feature, if you need it you probably can write SQL. And it's the best way to unambiguously define a query.
Right. What I'm worried about though is how to present that many choices to the user without cluttering the interface. On the other hand the part-of-speech list is unbearably long and cumbersome to use, so an overhaul would be welcome. Just need to find a good way to do this.
The interface wouldn't be any more cluttered. Right now there are 4 buttons, each of which opens a pop-up menu. You have to open the pop-up menu every time you want to select or deselect a part of speech.
My proposal: There would be 4 buttons that each open a modal window with check boxes. You select or deselect the parts of speech you want, and click OK. This is no more complicated in terms of number of widgets, but the UX flow is smoother. If you want to arrange the parts of speech so that each general grouping (verb, noun, adjective) has a checkbox that selects all the specific ones, that would be cool.
Ah, got it. I agree this would be much better than what we currently have. Now will I have the bandwith to implement it in the near future... :)