My university chinese language placement interview had the surprise outcome of bumping me into a higher stream - which means a new textbook.

This one isn't in the textbook list. It seems logical to me to first make a generic pleco-like flashcard list which can then be imported into a custom list here. It sort of looks like Skritter is basically doing a standard flashcard format import but you have to put all the hanzi in first and then you can fill in definitions on anything which doesn't already exist?

I'm guessing that's just going to be the proper nouns which is the only thing that has definitions in my flashcard file too...

If my custom list is all done nicely does that make it a candidate to put into the textbook section? How's that work.

I'd think it'd be much easier to enter the characters to Skritter first and do an export to your pleco or other software from there, but that's just me.

Congratulations on the higher placement! You'll make more progress in a harder class than an easier one.

We try to be flexible in the vocab import. If your vocab list can be formatted with characters first and tabs as separators, then you can probably dump it in and have Skritter pick up any definitions and pinyins for words that we're missing. Like this:

房子 fang2zi5 house; building

You can also use pipes (|) as separators, and you can put in pinyin with tone marks instead of tone numbers. You can leave out some of the definitions or pinyins. You can put in simplified and/or traditional versions .

If you want to make it really easy, you can have it autocreate the sections by using this format for section headers:
* Chapter 1
房子 fang2zi5 house; building
国 guo2 country; state; nation
* Chapter 2
...

Thomas, maybe so but I don't trust putting the time into whacking it in Skritter only to have it get swapped by an unfortunate bug. Local copy first. :)

Nick, that's awesome. It looks like you'd just need to search and replace // to * in order to import standard flashcard format. Cheers!

Oh, fair warning, I'm putting Niubi into a flashcard file. You should probably grapple with your morals to decide if you want it on Skritter or not :)

http://www.amazon.com/Niubi-Chinese-Never-Taught-School/dp/0452295564

@Lurks that's awesome, I would totally use that list. You saw the profanity list, right?

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=agVza3JpdHIWCxINVm9jYWJMaXN0SW5mbxip9bkGDA

James

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=agVza3JpdHIWCxINVm9jYWJMaXN0SW5mbxip9bkGDA

It's sanctioned ;)

I'll added // as a section indicator if that's standard, so you can use // or *. That'll get uploaded by tomorrow.

Yeah // is basically the standard but the way sections work is like this:

//name of title/chapter 1
blah
blah
//name of title/chapter 2

Which is probably not something you'll do because you're naming the the title up top and using markers just to name the sub sections. It's no big deal, but it does mean I'll need to edit these lines anyway so exactly what the syntax is for a section marker isn't that important.

Lol at that profanity list. I peeked inside the sex category and 飞机场 is there. What the hell! Turns out this is a euphemism for flat breasts. Oh my, tears of joy. It does raise a point though, if you basically have a definition for a word, a list cannot have an alternative definition right?

To illustrate, currently it would be pointless having a list of say "Common euphemisms" when every word is just going to show up as the CE-CEDICT entry?

Right, no list-specific definitions. Makes profanity lists a bit of a trick. If it's also a common word, we shouldn't put the profane sense in there. Once we allow custom definitions, you'd be able to use those for this.

I kinda have to disagree - if it is a common word, it would be only a good thing to have the profane definition as well. A good dictionary would, and I would certainly like to know if the word I'm using has "other" usages so as to avoid embarrassment and increase my understanding of the language. 操 already has the profane definition, currently.

+1 on what @digilypse said.

I also strongly agree.

(with digilypse)

There are enough people whose kids are using Skritter, plus the high school students whose teachers would not appreciate it, that I don't think we can do that.

Heaven forbid the students discover an actual dictionary :)

As a parent of an 8 year old Skritter user, I'm grateful you're keeping the profane definitions out the basic definitions. Be as creative as you like when custom definitions are available.