(sorry if this has been mentioned before)

I'm not sure if the Skritter vocab database includes a measure word field, but I think a measure word practice option / mode would be very useful.

I'm imagining something like a prompt with e.g. "一 ... 人" and a voice reading that where possible, and the user might write 个 or 位 in this case.

The prompt could then display "一个人", and maybe the voice could even read it out for extra reinforcement.

I imagine the basic means for this would already be entirely possible with Skritter's existing technology, and would be extremely useful for most users.

This is a superb idea.

Indeed a useful idea and it would save me much embarrassment when trying to conjure up the correct classifier on a whim.

Awesome idea. I'm so tired of defaulting to 个 so often.

+1 for this

This isn't a Skritter solution, obviously, but there's a comprehensive list of measure words here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_classifiers

That would be cool! I've marked this down as a good idea, but I can't imagine how we'd do it easily right now. Perhaps it will fall out of another system, like the planned example sentences, if those could be tagged like this and be made to use for prompting. Not sure how they will work yet.

Does someone know a source of piles of example classifier sentences? (I could probably whip up a simple practice web site / iphone app until skritter at some point in the future supports it (: (At which point I would shut it down as I am not interested in maintaining websites long term)

Hmm could probably download a few thousand tv series/movie subtitle files and grep them for short sentences with measure words in them.

What aeriph proposes is an example of a "cloze test"; SuperMemo and Anki both have ways of generating them quickly from sentences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloze_test

I actually don't think it's super necessary, because you can do just as well with some of Skritter's existing features. In the case of "一...人" you could add two sentences "一位人: one person [formal]" and "一个人: one person [informal]" to your practice list, then hide the pinyin when you practice.

James

Putting it in super memo would be the easiest part, getting the sentences would be the harder part. For me things like supermemo and anki are not that useful. Most of my spare time is out and away from a computer (which is why it pains me that there is no skritter iphone app)

http://www.engkoo.com is a fairly decent place for getting sample sentences.

@jww1066

yeah I already have Anki set up in that way - the pinyin toolkit provides the measure words and I can study with them with cloze test cards.

I don't think the fact that Anki and others can already do it precludes Skritter from offering the same functionality, though.

I wasn't saying that the Skritter guys shouldn't do it because it's in Anki/Supermemo. Actually the fact that the competition does it might give them more of an incentive to add it. Sorry for the confusion...

James

James, I never thought of cloze deletion for measure words. That's a great idea.

So does anyone have a pre made flash card set for Anki? I havent bothered with Anki however this would be a motivation to use it (:

@xkfowboa

Anki can produce measure word flashcards for you with a plugin called Pinyin Toolkit. So you could export all your Skritter vocab and create a deck of flashcards in Anki with it, then have it automatically produce measure word cards for all of your vocab, where applicable.

As James said, cloze deletion is really effective for this.

Actually, James, do you have any other tips like that for Anki? I've been using it for a while but always feel like there's more it could do for me.

Sure, what would you like to know? What are you doing with Anki now? What kinds of cards do you study?

I've a question if anyone can answer. I'm using anki and have a chinese (hanzi) field and an English field. Is it somehow possible to use the pinyin toolkit so that the hanzi in the chinese field appears coloured on hitting a key?

@byzanti: AFAIK the Mandarin and pinyin toolkits are only set up to colorize the pinyin.

I have some Java code that trawls through the Anki database and "fixes" various things. It currently adds colors to pinyin, but I think you could adapt that to add colors to the hanzi. Do you know a little bit of Java? If so I'll send it to you.

James

Sadly not - don't worry about it. Thanks anyway!

As one of the authors, I can tell you that the pinyin toolkit *can* colorize the hanzi :-). Add a field called "Color" to your Mandarin facts, and the Toolkit will automatically fill it out with tone-colored hanzi.

You can then trivially include this field into the answers of your cards so you can see the colored hanzi along with the answer.

Heh, gosh that's smart.

The thing is I don't really want to see colours all the time - just to check after I've tried to pronounce from the hanzi. Is it possible to set a key to colourise it? Or is there some other way to make it optional/on demand I haven't thought of?

I've really just been using Anki for the most basic stuff at the moment - and am not too clued up on its deeper possibilities.

Cheers!

@Max, that's great, I didn't know it could do that.

How does it deal with the fact that some hanzi have different tones in different contexts? I think when I tried the pinyin colorization six months or so ago this was still a problem, but maybe you've fixed it since then.

James