The main issue with doing English->Chinese reviewing is that there are multiple Chinese words or characters that correspond to an English word or phase.
Even as something as simple “eat dinner” could be “吃晚餐” or “吃晚飯”. More common phrases like “look” or “see” being almost impossible to map, since at the character level they could map to 看 見 視 瞧 觀 and so on.
Given this, I think such a mode should:
- Only be for words, given the character overlap issue above.
- Show both the English meaning and 1+ sentences on the front (with the Chinese word removed)
- Have the user type in the word using a Chinese keyboard, or also optionally allowing to input the pinyin directly.
- Only act as an “extra study” mode, and be separate from the main paths within application.
Set up like this, I can see some utility to it. But I’m unsure if and when we would implement such an auxiliary feature.
We’ve had a similar idea of “cloze sentences” being mentioned at least once before in this thread.