Well, after my last idea went down horribly, I thought I'd raise another on the forum.

How about pictures in Skritter for definitions?

Boo-ya, boo-ya!


...Well in fact, if you're testing the custom definitions (or are they site wide yet?) you can already have them. Just add html to the definition field. I suggest searching google images with "icons" selected on the left to get the right size. Then maybe upload someplace else for safe keeping.

Cheers Nick, this is very cool, and will certainly help retention.

http://tiny.cc/cqf5b

Cool! I wonder what the cross site scripting implications are if we view other peoples custom definitions.

Well mine's in the definition field rather than the mnemonic one, so can't be shared. However, it is currently working in the mnemonic field too, but appears only as code if you look in the shared bit.

Nick tells me it's not quite intentional though (he was just wanting to enable some bits of html), but I damn well hope he keeps it :p.

Err, ignore what I said. I read your thing wrong :p. I'm hoping entry can be limited somehow, keeping the img tag amongst others....

Great idea. I study German with: "Exeltra 200 words a day".

Stupid name and stupid website. Waite till you bought the program. It is fantastic.

http://www.200words-a-day.com/learn-german.html
and
http://www.200words-a-day.com/

What they do is to give you a picture. If the picture got a male/female/animal as main character, the word is male/female/neuter. They also color code it green/red/yellow for male/female/neuter. (instead of male/female/neuter it can be used for tones)

Then they have another memory trigger. This is already being incorporated in skritter. They have a sentence or something in English that is funny. Something like the Wolverine sentence in the picture of Byzanti/ For example:

German: "to hiss (spit)" = fauchen

So, imagine a man hisses and spits out a FALCON!

Check out the first link, it shows it very nice with the picture. I know this is not the main focus of skritter, but if this could be incorporated in some way it will be very helpful and will def make skritter even more unique (if thats at all possible.

Also it does not have to be all at once.Words can get their pictures as the time goes on and as nice pictures come up. The exaltra guys were so successful, they are doing the same thing in I dont know how many other languages. They even got a couple of cartoonist as full time employees so to get the pictures they need.

It seems image html has been disabled (although it initially shows, but later gets converted). Any chance of getting it back?

I didn't change it; that's just how it was buggy, 'cause the conversions aren't finished. I will yet work on it.

Groovy!

I've finished the conversions, I think. These work for both mnemonics and custom definitions (but only in the prompt; the formatting won't be converted in other places yet).

You can now make words *bold* and _italic_, which I've started using like this:
雅 (yǎ, "elegant"): *Short-tailed bird*s are _elegant_, especially the sound of their *teeth*.

You can make make line breaks by pressing shift+enter, to separate different senses.

You can do other HTML for now (we'll see how that goes), but you'll be editing the raw tags. So you can put images in that you find online with the usual img src tags. Images will be shrunk down to 50px tall for you.

Have a try!

Cheers Nick!

To everyone else: give it a shot! I've finding it really does help recall - pictures in the definitions field for common nouns, and in the mnemonics field either picture representations of the character parts, or little custom mnemonic pictures. Generally only do this if I think something is going to be particularly hard to remember, or am not quite clear on exactly what the thing is.

Customised mnemonic pictures are the rarer ones (they take too much time, whereas the other ones are google images, drag to desktop, drag to ftp client), but here's an example.

http://tiny.cc/n62vg

That 横 mnemonic image is awesome. I have so much trouble with that character! But I see you haven't shared it. :(

Mnemonic images weren't working! I was stock piling them :p. I'll share it when it next comes round...

(Incidentally, check your mail!)

Okay, fixed the _ _ issue you mentioned.

I've killed all HTML tags and changed the image linking to use a simpler, more secure format:
img:http://www.example.com/img.png