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Praise and a suggestion!

DaXia   February 4th, 2011 1:23p.m.

I have now been using skritter for a few days, and I got to say that I just like it more and more. I tried it on my phone earlier today and it worked surprisingly well, so kudos the creators!

Also, I have a suggestion. Would it be possible to add the word class of what ever word you are practicing?

It wouldnt have to be anything advanced, just like a "动" for 动词 or "副" for 副词, 名 for "名词" etc.

You could put it before the translation, like:
__ __ (庆祝)
qing zhu
动:To celebrate
今天我们来____一下!

or for a word that could be used as more than one word class:

__ __ (高兴)
gao xing
形:happy.
我今天感觉特别____.
动:Be happy to.
你不高兴干就拉倒。



I believe it could help a lot when you're trying to understand how to use new words.

InkCube   February 4th, 2011 1:48p.m.

I would love that too. My hopes for the near future are not all to high though since I'm sure this would be a lot of work.

I think however, that would be especially helpful to get a better sense of how to use a word and make words with lots of different meanings less confusing.

I find it especially annoying that the fact that a certain character is also used as a classifier is easily lost in a big wall of definition...

DaXia   February 4th, 2011 4:06p.m.

Yeah, it would really be super helpful. Another thing that could be helpful would be if there you could add the Chinese explanation of a word, like take 表态 for example. The English translation is "make known one's position; declare where one stands; commit oneself", and im sure that might be helpful for some people, but if you look at the Chinese explanation: "表明态度", it makes a lot more sense, and is a 100 times more helpful to me.

I understand that all these changes would be a lot of work for one person, and I wish that there was anyway us users could help. I know I would be happy to help if I could.

Byzanti   February 5th, 2011 12:34a.m.

Daxia, if you click the definition itself you can edit it. It only takes a second and you can add whatever information you want (eg, all you suggested above). I've done something similarish. It is a big help!

DaXia   February 5th, 2011 12:04p.m.

Byzanti, thanks!

Btw, do you know how to add/write your own example sentences?
And what is a "mnemonic"? English is not my main language ^^

DaXia   February 5th, 2011 3:25p.m.

Forget the last post, I actually used the search function (for once :P) and found other already answered posts asking the same thing. I have activated the alpha stuff, and found out that you can be useful and send feedbacks instead of bitching about already known issues here :D

Be prepared to drown in an immense amount of feedback guys ^^

nick   February 6th, 2011 7:56a.m.

We're ready! I can swim in feedback much better than in water.

Byzanti's suggestion to add the part of speech and uncontracted Chinese phrase to your custom definitions is a good one. We aren't likely to add parts of speech to all our words because of the amount of work and because we don't have a good reference for resolving confusion on them (Chinese words often have multiple parts of speech).

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