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component breakdown

sonorier   June 6th, 2010 7:55a.m.

This really rocks!

Just a question though: how do you make it work? Do you guys have to manually input everything or is it automatic? I have seen often that the breakdown is different than the one given on dictionaries like yellowbridge.

For example the 月 radical in words about bodyparts and stuff they list as being rou4 and then a character similar to 月 but my IME can't write that apparently.
Another in 宿舍的舍, you have two components with the first one being the first three strokes and 古。 dictionary and logic say it is roof and phonetic 舌。

I pointed out a couple to you but if you are already aware of this, I don't want to bother you with useless feedback and clutter up your mailbox.

In some cases I also think that a more deep decomposition could help if one of the components themselves are a very complex and/or rare character.

And I guess you are also already working on showing which one is the radical?

I have never skrittered so much and with so much pleasure since i'm on it, and i'm making amazing progress.

多谢

百发没中   June 6th, 2010 8:55a.m.

Where is the breakdown? I was quite excited about it in the newsletter but I can't seem to find it. I haven't been skrittering that much recently so maybe I missed the according announcement...but if someone could quickly give me a pointer...(doesn't seem to be the Heisig method which only seems to reduce the amount of translations per character...)

Doug (松俊江)   June 6th, 2010 9:10a.m.

@百发没中 - Still in alpha; Nick can add you to the list if you wish.

nick   June 6th, 2010 9:12a.m.

Yes! Approval!

We parsed the decompositions out of the Unihan standard, which we had a PDF of. That was fun.

Yes, there is confusion between the original meat radical (⺼, ròu) and the moon radical (月, yuè) which has taken over for it. Not sure if I'll do something to go and transform some of the 月s to ⺼s.

For 舍, it seems both are wrong:
"囗 wall and  [the first three strokes] roof (cf 合) made of 屮 straw; the similarity with 舌 in the modern form is fortuitous"
--Karlgren.

So it should be , 十, and 口. Decompositions are hard and I'm still not sure how many mistakes there are in our data, but definitely some. I have not figured out yet how we are going to handle corrections and editing of them. For now, do keep sending them to me as you see them; I'm keeping track of them.

I do have code to display the full decompositions down to itty-bitty strokes, nested and using the decomposition type, similar to YellowBridge and MDBG. It proved unuseful in the prompt, but we'll put it in each word's popup box that will replace the magnifying glass lookup menu when that's ready. There will be other cool stuff in there and it'll be accessible from the prompt with a click.

Unfortunately, we have no data indicating which is the radical. How important do you think it is?

百发没中, the breakdowns are still in alpha testing. I will put you on the list today. We're getting close to releasing all the alpha-testing features.

Christian   June 6th, 2010 11:45a.m.

Can I apply for the alpha as well? Not that I have a lot of time for Skritter right now, but I'm extremly curious :-)

Christian   June 6th, 2010 11:45a.m.

PS. Same for the mnemonics.

sonorier   June 6th, 2010 8:52p.m.

the radical is not too important, i'm just an addict of information.

nick   June 6th, 2010 10:01p.m.

You're in, Christian. Have a try, and then hit us with the feedback!

jcardenio   June 6th, 2010 10:52p.m.

I'd toss a vote in for identifying the radical, maybe just in a different color than the other components? Having learned most (all) of my characters with skritter, I feel somewhat lost at trying to identify the radical in a character even if I can write it in my sleep. Something subtle would be nice, so I can start picking up on the pattern. Definitely not crucial though.

百发没中   June 7th, 2010 2:12a.m.

hey...thanks for adding me....I love it!

With certain characters I never realized how non-sensical the involved radicals were:)

Small input: in 揣测 it didn't get the second part of the radicals (and it appeared to think that it was just the one radical although I would have thought it was two...the top one being 山 and the other one being 而)。

sonorier   June 7th, 2010 3:34a.m.

@百发没中 you probably see the 'component missing' text in stead of the other component?

It seems that many characters don't have all components listed yet.

Some are listed with their character but not pinyin or translation and some miss the character and have only english and/or pinyin.

sonorier   June 7th, 2010 3:50a.m.

oh and i forget to mention, much more important than to know which is the radical, I hope you guys will implement the feature that states what kind of character it is: meaning-phonetic, associative compound, pictographic, ...

This is not always clear, especially when said pronunciation or meaning is not used anymore or the original pictograph has changed a lot.

nick   June 7th, 2010 9:35p.m.

Yeah, 耑 duān just wasn't defined in the system, so it couldn't show up yet. Once I refresh all the cached children, it will show up.

I have implemented the function that tells which is the phonetic and which are the signific components, where it's a phono-semantic composition, but I think that the source I got that data from and the source I got the decompositions from are different enough to make it very confusing. Plus, I haven't found a good way to indicate this. So it's hidden right now.

arp   June 7th, 2010 10:27p.m.

Definitely would like to be in on mnemonics and components alpha. Thx.

nick   June 8th, 2010 11:49a.m.

Okay arp, you're in. Try it out and let me know if you've got any ideas for improvement.

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