Hi
I have been missing the example sentences like the ones you can see on the browser version on android for a LONG time.

It seems people dont understand how important it is to see words used in a context if you want to be able to understand them (understand, not memorize). Because its first when you understand a word that you actually can use it.

This feature is I-N-V-A-L-U-A-B-L-E and should be a top prio if you are serious about users learning anything from skritter.

I mean the example sentences are obviously already there, all you need to do is to figure out how to have them show up in the android version too.

I am not a programming expert, I'm a linguist. I dont know how much work it would take to add this feature, but I do know very well how you learn languages and I cant stress enough how important this feature is.

Thanks for the question, DaXia. I agree, example sentences are incredibly important to help give deeper meaning to words and characters. They absolutely should be in the Android app. The problem is that our current example sentences leave much to be desired, especially for high frequency words. Data-mining sentences didn't work as planned so we're looking into alternative solutions. In all likely hood, we'll be creating our own significantly better and more level appropriate sentences.

On the programing side of things, sentences are prone to causing sync issues and they're hard to support. Asking you guys to clear local data every time an error is reported is less than ideal. We're working on improving that system in the coming months. We'll try to have example sentences in the Android app as soon as we can, and keep updating things as improvements roll in.

@DaXia I'll second that! Context! Context! Context! I missed example sentences on Android so much that I started putting my own example sentences in the "mnemonic" field. It feels wrong to use such a hack but I do think a good example sentence is more useful than a mnemonic and for now there's no other way to do it.

@SkritterJake Bad examples are better than none! Plus we can always put in our own. Technically, is supporting example sentences any different from supporting mnemonics?

@Kai Carver They'll be back in soon enough (in the next Android update), but I still would argue that bad example sentences are not better for beginners. While context is crucial to full comprehension, overly complex sentences cause additional confusion and frustration (and tons of support emails!). Skritter isn't meant to be a dictionary, it's a language learning tool, so we're going to try and make our sentences more relevant to that goal moving forward.

@SkritterJake I agree bad example sentences are pretty terrible for beginners. Also it's a waste of time searching through long, weird, obscure example sentences looking for a good one.

But what I like about the way Skritter is set up is that people can put in their own examples, and share them, same as for mnemonics. I've been copying in example sentences from Pleco, for example. And in the past used sentences from my textbook.

I'm also using Jukuu and Chinesepod a lot lately:
http://www.jukuu.com/search.php?q=只能
http://chinesepod.com/tools/glossary/entry/只能