I've just come back to skritter after an extended hiatus, and I'm happy to say that I'm now encountering a lot more Chinese definitions.

However, there is a problem: quite often the character that you are supposed to recall appears in the definition prompt! For example 公司 = 依公司法登记成立的社团法人营利企业组织。

Apologies if this issue has already been raised.

Agreed. My guess is these were all imported from a dictionary without much thought given to each one.

I think the only way they will improve is one at a time by user submissions. Click on the definition, edit, share, and everybody learns better.

I was just about to write a thread on this. Is someone proof-reading user-submitted definitions? I saw these three in my practice session today (my language is set to zh-ch-zh):

都：东京的辖区

独：独木舟

有：存在；出现；保持；存在；做特定事情的人；有特定框架的土地；ある。ものが存在している。；手元にある。

On some other characters the definition is ok, but incomplete. Or copy/pasted, so there are semi-colons and dashes in weird places.

I've been making my own definitions from an electronic dictionary I have at home. They're excellent. But they may be under copyright, so I should not be sharing them, right? Too bad--they're much better than the ones I've seen so far.

I just did an import from the Chinese Wiktionary, which was laboriously parsed only to turn up 8000 "usable" definitions (about half in Chinese). Much less than I was hoping for given its size, but I guess most of it was Chinese definitions of English words. The definitions we got are often not very good, either!

Please, if you are using the Chinese definitions, help out by fixing them up if you can, or at least getting rid of parts that are whack. murrayjames, if you are taking them word-for-word from that dictionary, then don't share them, but if you are making your own definitions based on the definitions in it, then they'd be cool.

Chris is proofreading user-submitted definitions, but the ones I just imported haven't been all proofed, as that would be a lot to do at once.

nick,

Cool, I'll add them as I go. For now----could you please ask the staff not accept any definitions that use the characters in the definition, esp. in the first part? Most of the definitions in zh-ch-zh are like this now. It kills the flow.

eg.the current definition of 佛 is 佛陀；佛教的；仁慈的人；佛像；死去 (Jpn.)。The character 佛 appears three times in its definition, so accurately grading your writing is impossible....

Sorry to post again so soon. But, well, here's the current definition for 黑. This is not even a definition. It's a bunch of words that happen to have the character 黑 in them.

黑:

黑暗；黑白；黑白分明；黑斑病；黑板；黑板报；黑帮；黑不溜秋；黑沉沉；黑道(儿)；黑道；黑点；黑店；黑洞洞；黑豆；黑度；黑更半夜；黑咕隆咚；黑海；黑糊糊、黑忽忽、黑乎乎；黑户；黑话；黑货；黑晶晶；黑牢；黑亮；黑溜溜；黑瘤；黑龙江；黑马；黑茫茫；黑蒙蒙；黑名册；黑墨；黑幕

Nick, if it's not possible to edit the latest round of definitions, then could you roll it back? I'm not sure these are worth keeping. There are only 3 or 4 definitions out of a hundred that are any good.

I disagree. I love the new definitions and have seen many which are useful and several that only needed a slight tweak.

Chinese definitions are not up to speed because no one has been adding any yet. By Nick throwing a bunch of stuff in there, no matter how useful it is, it at least is encouraging people to edit, think about, and add Chinese definitions.

If you run across a bogus one, why not do the community a favor and fix it up?

Thomas,

I have been. I guess your experience has been nothing like mine. I posted 5 real examples of bad definitions above. Most of what I see is about this bad.

I'd rather add working definitions than fix a bunch of broken ones. Broken definitions are not encouraging; they're annoying. If the definition gives the answer away (or if it's wrong) then you can't test yourself fairly on writing. It interrupts the flow of your practice session, which is a total buzzkill.

@murrayjames - what proportion of the Chinese-Chinese definitions have been useful?

About one in ten.

I wonder how many users are using zh-ch-zh mode. The more of us the better, since more users means faster fixes.

What translation are you using?

I'm still using English. At some point I'd like to switch to Chinese-Chinese though.

I switched to zh-ch-zh a while back, but it was only a few days ago that I started seeing Chinese definitions. Within a couple of days I'd put it back to English.

Having the character in the definition was one problem, but the main thing was I often couldn't even understand the definition. Most likely my Chinese isn't up to it yet, and I have 3000 overdue items to get through before I take on a new challenge.

@Lyons - I had over 4,000 due a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday it was down to zero (but now it's back to 524, damn it!) As usual, once I actually sat down and started attacking it it didn't take that long.

@James - I've also been bringing mine down from over 4000, having spend most of October travelling. I haven't felt like attacking it in one mammoth session, so I'm just Skrittering my usual amount daily and it's slowly coming down. No hurry! It's still practice, though I am looking forward to adding new words sometime.

@Lyons - I am afraid, it seems to be the norm in China for the character in question to be in its own definition. When I first started reading Chinese - Chinese definitions, I also cocked an eye brow to that. My teacher told me that was common for Chinese.

With that said, I haven't been using the site's zh-ch-zh option. I find the example sentences have enough problems as is. I will wait for them to get all of the kinks out before I try my hand at zh-ch-zh.

What if the Skritter dudes made a function to replace any characters in the word with a blank and fill it in only after you have written the word, similar to the current situation with example sentences?

Example:
Word - 满意
Current Definition - 满足自己的愿望；符合自己的心意
Proposed Change - _足自己的愿望；符合自己的心意

It's one way to get around the problem of seeing the character you are being tested on but will most likely get confusing in some situations.

+1 on Thomas's idea.

As long as it doesn't affect our custom definitions though. I occasionally write the actual character in the definition if there's another similar word that uses it, it's an easy character anyway, but if I put a cloze deletion it would be ambiguous to which of the two characters the referred word used...

Good call, Thomas. I'm running a script to do this statically rather than dynamically, as it's less complicated. It won't hit your custom definitions either. I'm using the full-width tilde (～), similar to what I've seen in other dictionaries.

Yes, +10 on Thomas' idea. That'll make things a lot easier.

Nick, Thomas:

Those tildes are a godsend. I've started using them in custom definitions too. THANKS