I am very much enjoying skritter for learning characters, but am wondering if there is a way to expand the practice to writing stock sentences?

Cheers

AT

Well, you can enter you own sentences. You just need to enter the pinyin and the definitions for yourself.

I have wondered the same thing.

For example, I started a list for poems, but I hesitate to do add poems, since I fear I am "polluting" the dictionary with bogus phrases and definitions.

I recently added this poem by 王維 Wáng Wéi:

鳥鳴澗 Niǎomíngjiàn: Bird Song Brook

人閑桂花落 rén xián guìhuā luò: person quiet osmanthus flower fall
夜靜春山空 yè jìng chūn shān kōng: night quiet spring mountain empty
月出驚山鳥 yuè chū jīng shān niǎo: moon appear startle mountain bird
時鳴春澗中 shí míng chūn jiàn zhōng: often call spring brook within

Who knows what the proper "definition" should be for poem verses... In this case I opted for character-by-character definitions, but maybe a more proper translation is better.

I would share my list, but apparently I can't change it once it's shared.

I do agree with Kai, I am not sure if we would pollute the Skritter dictionary with the sentences.

What do you think Creators? can we do that?

not quite the same as sentences, but a few months ago I asked whether I could make a list of Taipei Metro station names (and therefore add them as entries in the dictionary). Creator-Nick :-) answered:

"You should absolutely add those station names to the dictionary. The only people who will see them are people looking at your list or looking for those station names. Well, and Chris, who will check over them for typos and such."

So maybe "pollution" by sentences isn't a problem in that no one will notice they are there unless they explicitly look for them?

The only issue would be if the sentence meant something different in the poem than it did in normal conversation or text, which doesn't look like it's the case with the poem you mentioned.

James

Skritter already includes some Chengyu ("proverbs"?).
They have meaningful translations given, not just character-by-character, and sometimes the definitions include a similar English proverb . I think they are great.
If the poem means anything more to you than straight characters, please add it to Skritter. After all, if I want character translation I can get that in MDBG.
Rachael.

Yeah, same with metro stations as sentences. Put whatever sentence you want in, and maybe someone else studying the same poem won't have to, or put in something that is so unique that no one else will see it--that's totally fine.

Rachael with experience I think you are right that a poetic translation is better than character-by-character.

The reason I chose the latter for the last poem I entered was that I didn't know the poem well enough to do my own translation (obviously) or even to choose an existing one, and also I had a slight hesitation to just copy an existing translation without attribution.