Dear Skritter creators:

Skritter is so wonderful and helpful that it has surely been inspired by the chinese gods.

Then only minor problem I have been experiencing is that after practicing and cumulating many hanzi, I begin to lose the "contextual" value of the hanzi.

Because of the contextual structure of Mandarin this is a real problem.

The ideal solution for this problem would be to provide a simple "example sentence"; besides that the new PRACTICE design is very helpful for addressing this issue, since now I can study the lessons a day after, a week after, a month after and so on, and because of the wonderful coding it counts for the TOTAL PRACTICE as well.

Many thanks Skritter creators, you are the best.

SKRITTER RULES!

Example sentences would be awesome. I think the problem is finding material they can legally use.

I also like to study phrases for extra context. You might be interested in some of the lists that focus on phrases:

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

James

"Then only minor problem I have been experiencing is that after practicing and cumulating many hanzi, I begin to lose the "contextual" value of the hanzi. "

Yeah, it's a major problem for me, for words too (esp. with pinyin hidden).

Custom definitions will help when eventually that comes. I think the next thing will be mnemonics. I'll probably put a hint/example in there instead...

Actually, we're currently talking with another site that might be able to provide us with these definitions for a fairly reasonable yearly fee. It wouldn't be a great solution since the sentences won't be level-specific and won't take into account your learning history, but they might well provide you with some of that needed context.

The holy grail as far as this is concerned is a feature that's on the way back burner but would work like this: since we know what you've learned, and how well you've learned it, and Chinese grammar is ridiculously easy, Skritter would theoretically be capable of making highly tuned example sentences for you. These sentences would only contain characters you had learned, and could even be set to include predominantly characters you are either currently learning or those that you struggle with.

The reason it hasn't been built is that it would be a big undertaking to write the parsing and grammar logic, but it has the potential to be super-awesome.

There is the possibility that we could have a stopgap up shortly though.

Another solution might be to provide an edit function for you word entries (custom definitions +). For example, I have loads of self-produced example sentences I would be able to insert. No copyright issues there.. Anyway I agree the new practice page is already a major improvement! Anxiously waiting for further development. :)

@george: That sounds like a great idea, but what would grammar have to do with it? I would think it would only need to look at what words/characters are already learned, which are problematic, and which sentences are made up entirely or mostly of learned and/or problematic words/characters.

It could be something like the "Skritter word finder" (which unfortunately seems to be down - what happened?) except for sentences.

James

Hey guys--I just found this Tatoeba project, which is awesome! I'm asking them about what we can do together. In any case, independent of Skritter, if you have example sentences, it would be noble and good to contribute them here:

http://tatoeba.org/eng/pages/index/

Yeah, I have this problem to some extent also... I can't tell you how many times I've been stumped by the definition of a basic character like 以 because I'm so unfamiliar with it as a standalone character. Same with 麼. Of course I know them in any useful context, but always blunder when having to identify one of those from it's stand-alone meaning.

Would be awesome to have a link to the pleco dictionary definitions. I love their example sentences. Or zhongwen.com's list of words containing the single character.

@kohoutek Why would you study a list with 麼 alone in it? All the lists I use would have it as part of a word anyway.
Unfortunately pleco uses licensed dictionaries so the they wouldn't be free. The example sentences in the Tuttle learners dictionary (through pleco) are brilliant though and what I use every time skritter gives me a word I don't know.

Yeah, I know. haha. I think it snuck in there from the 100 most frequently used character list at some point? I'm really not sure. My text book lists don't have things like that listed as individual characters. :)