We've started working on the next version of the example sentence system. (I've just set up the text segmentation backends we're going to need). Here's what we're thinking:

1. Importing sentences from Tatoeba, hopefully with a way to contribute new ones back there. (Does anyone know any other good sources of sentences with translations that are free to use?)

2. Sentences for both Chinese and Japanese.

3. User-created sentences, with editing and remixing sort of like we have with the mnemonics.

4. Definitions of sentences in all the different source languages, like we have with normal vocab.

5. Better, editable sentence segmentation into real component words.

6. Better sentence cloze deletion, where just the characters/words of interest can be blanked out instead of the entire word segment containing the character of interest.

7. Perhaps: a way to indicate which words the sentence is a good example for.

8. A way to study the sentences directly, as if they were normal Skritter words, but perhaps not doing the writing prompts (or not by default, anyway).

9. iOS implementation, after we've got it running well here.

We're looking for feedback on 8 in particular. Does anyone want to be able to study entire sentence writings, or should we leave that out? What about sentence tones?

If y'all have other suggestions that we could work into this, we'd like to hear them--keeping in mind that sometimes when building features, easy-sounding things can be unfeasibly hard, and vice-versa. Now that we have ways to do automatic (although not perfect) text segmentation, there are some new possibilities in what we can do, like turning big chunks of text into component words.

I'd like to be able to study sentences directly. Could there be a sentences studied statistic added?

Definitions and readings for sentences would seem sufficient.

For sentence definitions, there are two options: either ask for the meaning of the sentence or ask for the meaning of a word (or many words) GIVEN the sentence in which it occurs. Which one were you thinking about?

I’d like to study sentences directly, too!

And me as well! Great idea!

+1 on study sentences directly. If possible it would be very nice if we could mark several sentences for a word for study. Many times there are many good patterns that is good to study. Plus the reinforcement that gives is very much needed for me at least. Also reading and comprehension would benefit from it. I guess that this will only be for words that we actively choose a sentence for and not by default for the shortest sentence. If it is by default we would end up with a lot of not needed sentences.

# 1 and #3 would be very nice as well. To use others sentences i think wold be very nice and if we also could help out the community by uploading it to Tatoeba that would be great. # 7 i find essential as well. For Japanese sources i think that almost all of them have been incorporated in to Tatoeba already. Mostly then Tanaka Corpus that also where used by Jim Breens projects. One problem with that is that many of those are rather old and comes from academic study so the usage is not really daily real life usage. Maybe a function to indicate the usefulness for a sentence? Sort of grading for usefulness/ correctness? We have many very advanced learners that are more likely to pick the most useful sentences. Could be as easy as indicate how many have choose a given sentence.

If Skritter could find and test me on sentences that are made up of words in my list, or at least where most of the words are in my list, that would be pretty awesome.

Marking sentences as passed/failed and keeping them in a list like characters/words would be great too.

I don't see much need to write or provide tones to whole sentences; recognizing a sentence from Hanzi/pinyin/both would be cool though. Having the option to go the other way might be good too. I would think that grading sentences on the 'honor system' would be enough for most people.

I find listening and repeating very useful for memorizing sentences. It would be great to have full sentence audio (even if it were computer generated).

It would be nice to have user created sentences checked by natives to make sure they are correct. If they are approved by natives they should become the property of Skritter so they can be preserved (so the user who created the sentence doesn't delete it or change it).

But this also brings up the issue of copy rights. How do you know if the users sentence wasn't copied from a book? I believe iknow.jp had a lot of problems with this and they removed the ability to share user generated content. Though I think they are working on a way to bring it back.

It would also be nice if the approved sentences could be reused for different words. For example if someone created the sentence to study the word. 母 and wrote.
私の母の誕生日は三月十日です。
My mothers birthday is March tenth.
I would want the sentence to show up when searching for
私,三月 and 十日.

I would like to have multiple example sentences show up as I study the same word. For example for 母 I might also get the example sentences of.
母は子供が好きです。
Mothers like children.
母と妹が映画を見ました。
Mom and my little sister saw a movie.

Note: These sentences were not checked by a native.

I think it's a great idea. May I ask though that there is an option that they do not show by default (or a flag that can be set behind the scenes to do this). I did my example sentences a long time ago in definitions, and as I found out last time, the auto example sentences were a big problem. Thanks!

Maybe we can expand this idea to having ‘blank’ miscellaneous flashcards as study items, where the user can study whatever he wants. We could have a customizable field for the question and a field for the ‘back side’, be it sentences, measure words, idioms etc.
Kinda as if we use Anki and shuffle the flashcards into the lot of things we study in Skritter. What do you think?

I would like to see example semtences show up when you click the INFO circle for a caharacter or word. It would be gat if the examp,e sentences could have community voting (+1) so that the best sentences come up first.

This is maybe a little outside the scope of Skritter but from reading some of your suggestions I thought... wouldn't it be cool if Skritter had a native Chinese/Japanese speaker on staff, and members with an active subscription could submit up to say, 10 sentences a week and the native speaker would check/correct it for them?

I think there are so many different options for sentence study that you'll be opening a can of worms on this one!

However, I'm particular to fill in the blank studying as well, though this kind of list would really need to be curated to make sure they're interesting/are useful. The filling in can be done by writing...

@Nicki there are places online where you can get this sort of stuff done either for free with a language partner or for a very low fee for an online tutor; try italki.com (there are probably many others).

+1 on adding the feature to study sentences directly would be awesome!

+1 on Nicki's suggestion

@Alan that's true, you can get it done for free, unfortunately the quality varies :)

Updating sentence systems sounds great! as a newbie most examples are weird and often too difficult and I have wished one could add own sentences from text books etc. Also maybe choosing difficulty like from beginner/intermediate/advance but maybe too difficult to implement.
User-created ones could be both good and bad I guess? you can get good quality and up to date sentences as well as a lot of junk entries.

I'd also like to have a sentence studying feature added to the other methods, without the writing. It would be great if we could get a pronunciation feature too like on Google's translator.

One thing I'd like to see is better selection of "default" example sentences. The ones I've seen for the words in my lists are generally incomprehensible to me because they contain so many words I don't know! (And the alternates were even worse)

Sure, perhaps Sentences 2.0 will have a better selection, but I have no desire to set an example for every one of my words & characters!

So, if automatic selection is "enabled" by a user (or not disabled), then Skritter would select the one sentence of those available for which I ALREADY KNOW the greatest # of words. This is possible because Skritter already knows the limits of my vocabulary!

This knowledge of my vocab should be a big help to ensure that the study aids (such as sentences) are actually good for me.
(also one of the key points to a "Skritter Reader" proposal I want to write up later on... mostly based on your interface at the Segmenter)

nomadwolf, although everyone asks for this, it's very slow (in terms of database access) to figure out how well you know each word in each possible sentence before selecting a default sentence, and is not all that much different from choosing the most-picked and least-tough sentence. I have improved the default sentence selection and the total sentence coverage on the current sentences on beta--why don't you give it a shot and see if it's any better?

Also note that the default sentences will get much better once a bunch of people start adding their own sentences and selecting (voting on) the good ones.

The introduction of studying sentences is a great step. I don't know about other users, but I currently use skritter to study characters/words and anki to study sentences. This will move all my studying to one place.

Have you thought about having an option to automatically add new words when you add a new sentence? (In the same way that you can automatically choose to add new characters when you add a new word)

I think that it's kind of a dangerous thing to do: you might end up with a lot of words that don't matter, and that can maul your studies. For the characters-in-words setting, you mostly get characters that will be studied in Skritter's eyes during the course of doing the words, but that doesn't happen with words in sentences.

nick, I understand, although, in theory it wouldn't need to be a real-time query, since an example sentence that worked 2 weeks ago will still work this week (even if there is a "better" choice now).

I don't use the website anymore because with a iPhone stylus it is so much better than the Wacom I have.

Anyway, the best is probably just to wait and see what you're putting together and then see if it's worth to make any changes!

[for the expensive DB lookups, that's too bad, because my suggestion for the "Reader" function was based on the same... to (subtly) highlight the words I don't know, and when I hover over a word, to show definitions/readings only for unknown words... for known words I'd have to click (like hidden readings in the study area.
But, unlike sample sentences, this should be real-time, so *sad face*.]

no worries.

The reader thing doesn't need to be nearly as fast, so if people were into it, we could make it do the queries in the background, and the word highlighting would come in as you started reading. Sort of like how vocab list section progress comes in batches after you view the section contents.