I was just studying a list of common surnames and I came across 沈. This character can be read either shen3 or chen2, depending on the context. If it's a character in a person's name (if it's a surname) , then it's read "shen3". If the context is "to sink in water" , then it's read "chen2" .

I actually don't have the above info memorizied, I just learned about it a minute ago.

The problem is that as I go through my list of surnames on Skritter, I keep hearing the wrong reading for this surname. I don't want to turn off the audio, because I learn better when listening to the audio, except when the reading isn't right.

What I propose is to be able to specify which reading is being studied when coming across these nasty multiple reading characters.

I had the same thought. Not only hearing the "wrong" sound, also when you learn tones or type the pinyin you generally only learn one.

I know that Skritter is focused on writing, but as reading is in the system as well, it would be interesting to discuss possibilities to learn all readings with all meanings associated to them.

Any ideas how that could be done? Reading depending on the vocabulary list as Bohan suggested would be one possibility.

It is so technically difficult to specify which reading should be studied for each word for Chinese that we are not going to extend the system to do it. I realize that it's not optimal to always have the extra info there when you only care about a specific usage, but it happens infrequently enough in Chinese for most users that we're okay with the trade-off. Sorry!

I think he meant being able to change which sound is played by himself?

@helixness Yeah, that's what I meant.

@Nick I think you may be misunderstanding me. For instance with the character I mentioned above, both of the readings are already displayed. There's usually a default reading which is fine, but sometimes the default isn't the one we want to study, so if we could just click on the other reading to change how the audio is played,that would solve the problem.

So what I'm suggesting is that we users pick the audio on our own.

Oh! That's slightly easier, but still pretty tough. Maybe someday we could work that in...

I think the misunderstanding was caused by my additional ideas. Sorry for that.

I also realised that the problem on my part could be influenced by the fact that I switched to German definitions. If I remember correctly, the English definitions were for all readings and a bit clearer sometimes. Also, I came across a case were the German definition for a traditional character was the same as for the simplified, even though other characters were also simplified to that one.

So I guess if there would be a way to get the English definition (maybe together with the original German definition in case that was already edited) in the Edit Definition function, the definitions could be made clearer.