Many users will agree that both Skritter and the Chrome Zhongwen extension are 必不可少 for maximum efficiency in studying Chinese.

Here are 3 small suggestions for better interoperability. Perhaps other users can find more.

[1] Study mode

[1.1] When hovering an expression with #characters > 1 in study mode, the corresponding word pop-up currently does not show up (only for individual characters). Enabling this could save a lot time for users who need more details. That way you could get to a variety of explanations and example sentences in a second without going the long way (i.e. Skritter word popup).

[1.2] I would also be glad if you could disable grading for shortcuts that include the ALT key (Zhongwen dictionary).

[2] Queue system

Please also take Zhongwen into account when coding the new queue system. Maybe you can ask the developer to attach the source URL to the var string sent to Skritter s. t. we know where an entry comes from.


Link to "Zhongwen": https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kkmlkkjojmombglmlpbpapmhcaljjkde

I'm not sure it will be easy to do 1.1. I'm guessing that the reason it doesn't work is that the characters are in different HTML elements. We need those different elements, and it sounds hard for Zhongwen to combine words across multiple elements.

For 1.2, can you provide a list of shortcuts we need to disable? That shouldn't be too hard.

We'll definitely have a separate queue-like list for Zhongwen words, and for MDBG words, etc. That'll give a lot of flexibility, I think. In fact, we already have the plugin passing the parameter in there that we'll use.

@nick I think 1.2 refers to the situation where someone is on the study page, hovers over a Chinese character/word, and hits Alt-1, Alt-2, etc., which open up different online dictionaries. In this case Skritter will also register the number portion as a grade and apply that grade to the item just studied, which is almost certainly not what the user intended.

James

As for 1.1, Nick is exactly right, the problem is that the Chinese characters in this case look like they are consecutive characters forming a word, but from an HTML perspective they are in different HTML elements. As a result, Zhongwen looks at them as if they were separate characters and never combines them to a word to look up in its dictionary. In almost all cases this is actually the behavior that you want. Usually, a word you want to translate is contained in a single HTML element, and when a new element starts it's practically always the beginning of a new word. But I agree -- and I've noticed this myself -- that on the Skritter study page it has an undesired effect. Fixing this in Zhongwen would be pretty hard, because it might interfere with how other (non-Skritter) pages are handled by Zhongwen.

I've fixed the alt behavior and it'll go live in the next upload. Thanks!

Awesome, thanks Nick?

s/\?/!/g

While we're talking about compatibility, the pinyin head word doesn't seem to wrap (for long ones) when using IE9.

Lurks, can you email a screenshot? Thanks!

Hokay.