I love Skritter but have had minor quibbles. However, I thought I had found a compromise that made me extremely happy until yesterday.

I dislike the ambiguity in the definitions of Characters that makes it a challenge to know which of two or more characters is desired many cases. As a result, I have been taking a more purely Heisigian approach of using the Heisig keyword as a cue and producing both the character form and the pinyin as the answer. It has worked very well and I am almost up to 1000 characters after blowing away my database in early January.

To insert the Heisig cue I am using a Chrome plugin described at:
http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=17981591

Since the changes of yesterday, this plugin no longer works and I am faced with a problem. Should I try to fix the plugin, or should I lobby the Skritter team to allow me to enter my own cues or what?

I even had the idea of having a custom list with one character per chapter using the Heisig cue as the chapter name. Then the provenance of the character would include the desired cue. Unfortunately, this would require that I set up such a custom list and blow away my database again.

Guys: what do you recommend?

Can't comment on the Chrome plugin, perhaps someone can fix it? With regard to entering your own cues, the Skritter lot are working on that, or at least it's planned.

Still, I wouldn't get too hung up on Heisig - it's good work and a great list, but you can still learn fine without being a stringent adherent, despite what he may say.

I am not hung up on Heisig. If the definitions provided better cues, I could survive with them. In fact, between Aug 09 and Jan 10, that is what I was using. The problem I was having is that I knew how to write the characters but couldn't tell which was being requested (admittedly in a minority of cases). This broke the flow and required a difficult judgement call about whether my failure on a character was that I didn't remember the character or a cue failure. In this case SRS becomes slow and a chore.

I think what I would really prefer being able to enter my own cue and challenge on the character, its pronunciation, and its meaning and score based on the overall knowledge.

I know that entering own cues has been planned as a new feature for Skritter but this matter has been discussed since last fall when I started using Skritter. It don't expect the Skritter team to solve my problem but I need a way of accommodating the present situation.

ntozubod - If the definitions aren't good just hit the feedback button and let the HQ know the details of the word or words. There is a balance between definitions that have enough detail/alternate meanings and ones that are concise enough for quick practice but feedback is definitely reviewed and definitions are frequently altered.

I recall that 角 didn't used to have unit of money in the definition until I gave feedback and got it changed (I learned it first as the written way of saying 0.1 RMB also known more commonly as 1 毛).

I think the Skritter team has mentioned planning to implement a function to allow users to add personal cues/notes to a words.

Incorrect or incomplete definitions are a problem, yes. OTOH there's a lot of ways to say certain things and it's probably not a good idea to get too hung up on memorizing English definitions for things that can't be defined well (or, at least, in a way that would give you a complete understanding of how to use the word in the Chinese language) in English words. Things like 吉祥 and 福 come to mind though I suppose there are better examples.

Just, memorizing definitions rather than how to use a word doesn't really get you anywhere except more proficient with flashcards. It's extraneous knowledge. I know very well what 兴致勃勃 means, but seeing a definition like "Merry; sprightly; feel a surge of exhilaration" would never make me think "兴致勃勃" so much as, "Huh?　That could be anything!" I'd probably be fairly annoyed after seeing the answer, since that English definition hardly brings to mind the same sort of feeling the Chinese expression does. I'd be doing worse than wasting my time memorizing that definition, I'd be hampering my ability to use the Chinese fluently.

Anyway, I bet there's a great deal of English words we wouldn't think of given just a simple definition. If you were shown ”活泼地；快活地“ would your first reaction be, "Oh, that's easy! Sprightly!"? Definitions are tools for understanding, trying to use them as cues is just...backwards.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't want to have to memorize the skritter definitions just to be able to recall a word. I have enough to remember as it is. It'd be nice to, say, add a sentence with the word deleted, so that I could see the definition as well as some context. Or something like that. I would probably keep displaying pinyin most of the time anyway since I use skritter more for tones and writing than vocab, but if I did want to work on recalling words I'd definitely want to use my own cues. So, support for personalized cues!

I have provided feedback and have found that sometimes it has an effect but I am of a mind that higher priority issues should be addressed ahead of details.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy Skritter and have learned an immense amount from the use I have gotten from this. I also understand and many of the potential users are new to Chinese and have different issues than me.

But on the other hand, I cringe every time I write the traditional form of the horse radical because the stroke order I learned 35 years ago is quite different. I learn to accomodate.

to digilypse:

I think the situation with words is different than the situation with characters. Words tend to have more accurate definitions than characters. Words are ultimately what you want to learn when you learn Chinese: Words and Sentence Patterns and how to use them properly.

Skritter works very well for Words as I discovered last fall but the main gap in my knowledge was, plain and simple, the characters. Once I get to a more solid level with these, I will switch completely to words and learn characters only in the context of words.

However, until the changes of yesterday, there was no way to focus in on the characters if you had a lot of words in your deck at the same time. I found that I was over-reviewing characters that occurred in a lot of compounds and under-reviewing the characters that I wanted to focus on. That is why I blew out my database and started with my Heisig approach.

I need to try the multiple list feature of practise and see if it helps me focus on characters with a lot of words in my deck. This is a definite improvement for me if it does.

As for providing feedback, 2Shanghai, that is what I am doing now and I believe am being constructive. I can provide detailed lists of conflicts if that would help but I have just so much time in a day for this. I am not a full time student of Chinese.

Hey ntozubod, sorry to hear about the recent problems. As others have mentioned, we are planning to allow people to not only store but also share and collaborate on mnemonics. The idea is that when you or someone else on the site makes a Heisig mnemonic (or perhaps mods a Heisig mnemonic for your own purposes) you can then share and tap into other people's wisdom. The sharing system will hopefully reduce everyone's workload since you won't have to create mnemonics for everything and it will give you access to the gems of other people's linguistic efforts. I know for instance that Nick has shared some of his mnemonics with me and I've decided to use them since they make more sense the ones I created.

Hi George,

I am not talking about mnemonics here although that may be an issue for other people.

The kind of problem I have is shown by the characters in kuai4su4 or xi3huan where the two characters that make up the word have meanings that are similar to the word. Heisig has keywords Fast for kuai4 and Quick for su4, Joyful for xi3 and Joyous for huan1. I can learn this limited distinction between Fast and Quick in order to choose the right character to enter and the right pronunciation to pick. Last night I got the cue "tree" from Skritter and wondered if it was the tree radical "mu4" or the tree word character "shu4". It was the latter. I found out later in the session that "mu4" has a prompt that includes the indication that it is a radical but this all means that I have to memorize the personality of Skritter and I just want to learn characters.

This, I hope explains my usage of Heisig. I am not a Heisig fanboy or anything like that.

I just created a custom list that contains all of the words in Chapter 9 of Remembering Traditional Hanzi 1. Each section has a name that is the Heisig keyword. It works great with one caveat.

Because of an off-by-one bug in Skritter, it gives the Section title of the previous section as the provenance. This has been a long-standing but but it is particularly annoying in this case.

There is an easy work-around though. Next time I'll create an off-by-one custom list where the sections will be shifted.

I tried an off-by-one version of my Lesson 9 list. It mostly looked good but now I have confused Skritter. It looks like state is kept in several places and deleting words in one place doesn't affect stuff happening in another place. There seem to be multiple bugs in the List / Section / Delete part of the system.

More later. I can't Skritter but I can Kibbitz.

Separate from the mnemonics, you will be able to edit the definitions to whatever you like, either submitting them as a correction (which we'll review) or keeping it as your own custom definition. You could put the Heisig definitions in there.

I'll make a bug for the one-off section thing and see if we can get that fixed. (Probably won't be a retroactive fix.)

Scott will be upgrading the delete feature to match the new multiple-list-source system we've got for items once he gets back. The old delete wasn't really built for the new practice navigation system, and the new one will be much better.

Did some debugging and the extension needs to be recompiled to match the new URLs for the practice page. I've emailed the author and perhaps he can set that up.

Thanks, Nick. I have looked at the situation with Chrome extensions. They look pretty easy to program and I was able to extract the code from the crx file which is really a modified zip. If the author doesn't fix this, I might be able to.

I guessed that the problem was the URL change. It sounds like you are confirming that.

I don't want the tail wagging the dog here. You have to do what you need to do for Skritter. Thank you for taking my problems seriously.

I am kind of shakey today. I am going through Skritter withdrawal.

-- Howard (Nto)

Yeah, I have withdrawn from Skritter since I started with Heisig. Using ANKI instead.

As soon as this mnemonics thing is in, I will be back!

Glad to hear that someone has made good use of my plugin. I've updated it and sent it to Nick for publishing on the Skritter site.

Hi PlutonB:

I have been very happy with your plugin until Thursday. Yesterday I had a close look at it and realized that there is a lot that can be done with it with a little tweaking.

Thanks for the extension. I have used it since the end of January. Thanks also for the easy intro to using Chrome Extensions to bend the Skritter interface.

-- Howard (Nto)

I've uploaded the extension here:
http://www.skritter.com/misc/skrittdefheisig.crx
(Uninstall the old one; this won't overwrite it.)

You can grab the source files too, if you want to mod it or see how easy it is to make Chrome extensions:
http://www.skritter.com/misc/skrittdef.zip

works with greasemonkey in firefox, too... unfortunately it does also show the keyword, when the hanzi is shown and the user should figure out the meaning, maybe someone can fix this...

Awesome!! I just switched to Chrome for that plugin lol and actually I'm finding it quite nice:

http://www.chrisdavaz.com/blog/switched-to-google-chrome

So glad I finally have the Heisig keywords! Thank you!

Thanks to PlutonB for the great add on, and thanks to Nick for updating it.

However, I have a little problem - I just realised there was a skritter.cn, and changed to it because I'm in china and .com was running very slowly.

But now the extension does not seem to work! anyone have any idea why or how I might fix it?

yeah just open the extension file with some zip programm (I used 7zip) and open the included file manifest.json with a texteditor to replace skritter.com ...

I hate to admit my total IT ignorance, but now I've changed it to .cn what next?

I uploaded to chrome extensions using 'upload unpacked extension' but its still not working...

@Nick

You have a timetable on when we can expect custom definition capabilities? I am trying to resist using a user made addon until I see what all you are implementing. I have never even heard of a Heisig until this topic, I am a very direct and unsophisticated language learner, but there are many custom definitions I want to add to my word lists.

Sorry, it is partially working, it has the 'look up' bar at the bottom but no prompts appearing like they do on .com

I've now realised that this is because the Heisig definitions aren't included in skrittdef.js. But when I previously installed from the link that Nick uploaded I got the definitions automatically;奇怪。 Are they included in the first link but not the source files?

Does anyone know where I can get the heisig keywords for simplified hanzi from?
I tried PlutonB's links on another post but they aint working these days...

I've now realised that this is because the Heisig definitions aren't included in skrittdef.js. But when I previously installed from the link that Nick uploaded I got the definitions automatically;奇怪。 Are they included in the first link but not the link to source files?

Does anyone know where I can get the heisig keywords for simplified hanzi from?
I tried PlutonB's links on another post but they aint working these days...

I've updated the zipped version to work on either .cn or .com and to include the Heisig keywords by default (one can still cut them out if desired).

Custom definitions are murbling around in there with the decomps (done) and mnemonics (not done). Not sure if we'll put all together or do the custom definitions soon after. The data structures will be in place once the mnemonics are built, though, so it shouldn't be too long after that.

where can I get the updated version? I tried downloading from the old link to the zipped file in your post above but that's just the same as before...

Very excited about the custom definitions, character decomps and mnemonics, its great to see skritter constantly improving.

Hi Nick,

I have been very happy with Skritter for the last few weeks. I feel that I am really learning the characters in a way that has not been possible for me before. According to Skritter I am at around 1600 (I feel this is somehow high) characters now, learning simplified and traditional forms together with one pinyin reading. The working skrittdef is a key part of this because I avoid problems with SRS prompts using Heisig keywords.

It is a little kludgy but works for me. I look forward to an integrated way of achieving the same thing. Again I say: Skritter is totally awesome.

-- Howard

Oh, I emailed it to you at the address you have on file for Skritter. I forgot to mention here that I haven't reuploaded yet so it's not hosted again.

By the way, we are figuring out a way that goes along with the custom definitions for you to automatically use the Heisig keywords built-in. So that might be happening before too long.

Been away for some time, too much work.. Seems like the problems mentioned has been sorted out. To those using the plugin: great to hear that more people have been making use of it! If only I would have done that as well for the last three weeks, my queue wouldn't be so frightening to look at... :P

This solution is just a temporary quickfix since I wanted to study Heisig with Skritter. The official integrated way of custom definitions will hopefully arrive soon and kick ass! :)