...pressing enter takes you out of "editing mode". This is kind of irritating when you want to use English definitions on the first line, then Chinese under, but since u cant press enter to change row...u get the point.

And also, when will we be able to edit and create new example sentences? I know this has been asked before, but could you give us some kind of time frame please. Is it next year, next month or next week?

Regards
/D

Some browsers you can just press enter (firefox on mac I think). I use a chrome variant and Ctrl-Enter forces a new line without finishing up.

Hmm. Just tested this. if I press Enter (which finishes it off) before ctrl-enter, I can't use ctrl-enter to create a new line again until the next prompt. Browser bug?

Byzanti, thanks for the advice, I tried it and I had the same problem as you had (I use chrome too).

Also, I would like to add a few questions:

1. Is there any way to see more words than 15 at a time when browsing "my words"?

2. Is there any way to add all characters/words from a vocab list without first reviewing them?

3. Is there any way to search vocab lists for specific chars?

4. Also, about "my words". Couldn't you add a feature so that you could sort them by Pinyin, by times you have reviewed them, by frequency etc?

If any of these features will be added, pls give some kind of time frame. The best way would be if you could add a "updates" tab, next to the "forum" and "blog", wherein you could write all pending changes that you plan to do in the near future, and all the changes you already have done. This way people would feel that this is a serious website thats constantly being updated.
Also, you wouldn't have to answer the same questions again and again in the forums.

I have a lot of friends studying Chinese that probably would love to become members, but I still feel that skritter kind of is in its "beta stages".

Regards
/D

I set it up so that you press shift+enter to get a newline while editing those. I wasn't aware that ctrl+enter worked sometimes; that's strange.

Scott's thinking of doing the massive example sentence overhaul after he does a few list changes. If he does, then it'll be sometime in the next several months. Hard to make predictions that far out, though. Definitely not this month.

No, you just see 15 words in My Words. For what purpose would you like to see more?

I'm not sure what you mean by adding all the words from a list without reviewing them. Can you elaborate? The standard method to add words from a list is to click "Study List" and then have the words gradually added to My Words as you study--are you asking for them all to be dumped in at once instead of gradually?

No, no way to search a vocab list for a specific character. What's the intended use case?

Sorting My Words by different sorts is too computationally expensive--it means that it takes longer to save each review you do, which makes the site slower. So we try to keep it to just the essentials there.

An upcoming feature roadmap might be a good idea. We'll take it into consideration with this big documentation push we're starting.

Just curious: what about Skritter gives off the "beta stages" impression you mentioned?

Hi Nick

I didn't know about the shit+enter, I will definitely try it!

1. The reason example sentences are so important is that now, a lot of characters and especially 成语 has no example sentences, making it very difficult to understand how they are used. And sometimes when studying only characters, the example sentence is for a whole word using that character. Take the character 青 for example. One of the example sentences are "把你的__吃光." And when reviewing that char, u might go, wtf? 把你的青吃光？？？ But the actual word in the empty lines is 青菜. And all the example sentences for 青 are like this, like: 松树是___.??? It's actually 松树是常青树 etc. I would reckon that about 5-10% of all single character example sentences has this issue, and thats a lot.

2. When you have 5k words or more in the my words list, there will be a lot of clicking "next" to take you from the first word, to the last word (or to some word in the middle).
Or lets say that you want to delete all your words, but only can delete 15 at a time....
Or lets say that you want to edit a word/character that you know the pinyin of, but dont know the character. Then it would be a great help if you could sort the words alphabetically.
Or lets say you want to search for words containing a specific character, like all words with 节 like 节日，节目，符节 etc.
Lets say that I have a hard time with 节 and wants to add more words with 节 in them. The problem is that there is no way for me to know which words with 节 I already have....unless I try to browse through my 5k words list, 15 words at a time, until I find a word with 节 in it.

3. Being able to search for words in vocab lists, would be a great help if you want to know whether a specific word or char is in it. Im studying the "top 3k characters" list atm. Let's say im reading a book and find a character I cant understand. Obviously I would like to add it to my list, so I can study it. The problem is that now there is no way to see if a specific character already is in a list or not, because unless I have already reviewed all the words in it and had them all added to "my words", there is no search function at all to use.

I hope you took no offence by that "beta" comment. I might have removed it, if there was any way to edit your posts^^
What I meant with it was that there are still a lot of issues that needs to be taken cared of.

Thank you!
/D

@DaXia I think you meant "shift-enter" :P

I agree, in an ideal world we'd be able to search the database using several different fields. In the meantime I think you can attack all of your problems in different ways:

For #2, you can already delete all your words with the "Delete All" option.

To find a character using its pinyin, you can use the Scratchpad and type in the pinyin (with tone numbers, hopefully). If it finds multiple matches, click on "All Results" to find your character/word. Then you can use the hourglass popup to delete it.

If you want to find more words with 节, just try adding them. If you're already studying them no big deal, they just won't be re-added.

Same for #3, just try to add any characters you want and if they're already being studied you'll get a message to that effect.

James

The example sentences are supposed to have bigger blanks to indicate multiple-character words. I've set it up so that it includes sentences where the character is used in a word, but at a lower priority than if it's used by itself. Before I did this, many characters didn't have any sentences, or had only ridiculously long ones where the character got mis-segmented as standing alone. (A lot of characters just don't stand alone much.)

If you search for 节, then just click on it and it'll give a you a few choices for words containing 节. More details here:
http://blog.skritter.com/2011/01/example-words-in-word-popup.html
In a day or two, when you do a search for 节, it'll also pull up all the words already in My Words that contain 节 (just gotta fix a small bug with that feature). It doesn't seem like you'd often need to page through a bunch of words in My Words, where using the search feature above the My Words table will do most of what you want, and the word popup and list editor widget will do the rest.

I can see the use of searching for words within a list. I'll put it on the feature list, although it's not on there as a very high priority. Thanks for the suggestion.

Okay, fair enough; I take your point. There certainly are a lot of things what need doing!

Thanks for the replies guys! I hope that you understand that I didn't mean any offence. I believe this is a great tool for learning Chinese. I'm just making sure that you still have the ambition to make it better and better :D


One last question. Im making a huge list of idioms, and my ambition is to make sure that 3500 of the most common characters will be in there, so that you can learn the idioms, and study the characters at the same time.
This will take a LONG time, and I just want to make sure that the nothing will happen to the vocab list, making it all in vain. Is there any way to import/export vocab lists, ie making a backup on the computer just in case?

@DaXia you can make the list in a word processor or Google Docs, then paste it into the list editor. Just be sure to follow the list formatting guidelines.

Have you looked at the existing idiom lists to see if some of the idioms you want to add are already there?

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/tags?tag=chengyu

James

That would be a great help james!

Could you please tell me a bit more about these list formatting guidelines? I did a forum search and checked the help section but came up empty handed.

You can export vocab lists; it's an option on the left side of the vocab list's page. Might be easier making lists on Skritter than in Google Docs, because it will fill in the extra information for you. Either way, really.

We also make it very hard to permanently delete lists, after losing a handful of them in the past due to a bug, but I'm not guaranteeing that a list on Skritter won't get corrupted and die somehow, so if it's important, it is worth making backups.

He might be referring to this style guide:
http://www.skritter.com/style_guide

But that's just for adding new words. Hopefully you won't have to add many of them. For pasting into Skritter without losing information, normally if you're making it in a Google Doc spreadsheet, it'll paste in fine, if you have, for example, characters|pinyin|definition or simp|trad|pinyin|definition, where the |s are tabs or pipes or just different columns.