Hey there,

due to a recent "problem" I wanted to see whether anybody feels the same way and/or whether this problem can be resolved with an adequate amount of effort.

My point is that since the release of Skritter's multi-language support I, of course, switched the learning language to my native one - per se a pretty awesome feature. However the (community) support for German - and quite likely for Spanish, Russian, French and others as well - is naturally not as good as the one for the English version leading to the following problem: Skritter takes an automated translation of the vocabularies the respective dictionary is offering which is unfortunately not sorted by the relevance of the meaning. This leads so far that some vocabularies have five or more translations which Heisig would not even dream about (as they have absolutely nothing to do with its most common meaning) and the “actual” meaning – which I want to learn - is either listed at the very end or not at all. Pretty frustrating! This was when I decided to take the task of finding the most accurate meanings into my own hands.

Consequently I created my own translations by comparing several dictionaries and write them next to an Excel export of all my vocabularies in Skritter. As soon as I finished that I wanted to import those into Skritter – and this is where the problem begins: As of now one can only change the meaning of a word when being in practicing-mode by clicking into the translation field. At first I was trying to do exactly that; however rather sooner than later the learning sandbox started to kick in and I was presented with the same words all over again leaving me unable to “correct” the meaning of other words. Also, I’d like to skip the actual learning part and be able to concentrate on inputting the new meanings. So the text thing I tried was to employ the deprecated cram mode where I created lists of 50 words each. To my knowledge the cram mode should have no influence on the “characters learned” so I just skipped them or filled them out wrong on purpose to get to the next character to input my translations. However it turned out that cram mode nowadays (or maybe even before, I never used it and may misinterpret its actual function) HAS influence on the characters learned so my “vocabularies learned”-graph soon began to fall down abruptly. This annoyed me so much that I eventually stopped skrittering for several weeks (something I really hate me for as I like the tool, but with the German translations it just sucks).

Please I beg you to create something where I can insert my own translation in batches. I’m really looking forward to use Skritter again but in its current state it is just useless to me.

Hoping for a positive reply
凯

I don't know about the rest, but you wrote: "To my knowledge the cram mode should have no influence on the 'characters learned'..." I think this is what the "track progress" next to the Cram input field is for.

James

Mhh, I see now button like that :(

*no

P.S. I agree that a bulk upload would be helpful. I was recently annoyed to learn that there were basically no Spanish definitions in the system. Since then I have been trying to find a free (as in speech and beer) Chinese-Spanish dictionary, without success. Anybody have any ideas? I found this Creative Commons one

http://dic.yizhouan.com/es.php/dicches

but it's not licensed for commercial use.

A followup feature request would be to add a discreet button to the definition allowing us to see the definitions in other languages. That is, show the definition in our primary language by default, but maybe pop up the other definitions when we click something. Then we could compare the definitions in the various languages we speak.

Sorry, I misspoke, it's the Scratchpad, not "cram". The checkbox is at the bottom of http://www.skritter.com/practice and (at least for me) says "Track progress".

"I’m really looking forward to use Skritter again but in its current state it is just useless to me."

I don't get it. Your English ability is better than the average native speaker. Can't you just suck it up?

Well, you will surely see my point when I say that I can learn a language much faster when learning native-foreign than foreign-foreign; additionally I am now stuck between some English definitions, strange German dictionary definitions and my own few :(

Also plz get me right there - I don't say Skritter is useless (in my opinion it's a truely awesome and I'd recommend it to any willing Chinese learner any time) it's just that the utility I derive from using it in its current form is greatly lowered.

Well, I am in totally same position, just in my case instead of German there is a Russian. In fact, I am in even worse situation, since my totally native language is even Latvian (however, as a former Soviet Union republic, in school both languages were taught at same relevance), so Chinese would be 4th language I am learning.
My experience though are different with your's apparently. When Nick was just starting to enable other language support, I was the one to beta test Russian. I felt immediate relief - as for some of the words, I had to do double translation sometimes. Like quite a specific word in English came our for a main translation of character/word, and I was then forced to refer to English/Russian translation. And still, as you can imagine such a new word in English, if you are not a native speaker, will be just "dead" - you do not know the context when English native speakers use it and why. So, you can't use it Chinese either. So, at that moment English native speakers was a step ahead. But NOW, i am not sure what exactly were done with Russian dictionary Skritter uses, the quality of translations for some words are brilliant. My wife is Taiwanese, and now, for those previously "dead" words, when I try use them - she says context where I use them are perfectly OK. I would not be able to achieve that using just English vocabulary.
So, I am puzzled why you have so bad experience with German part - for me now, as I said it is a relief.

P.S - seems the quality of German free dictionary they use in Skritter is not good - then really bulk upload is the only way to solve it :/

@icecream "Can't you just suck it up" seems kind of harsh. I definitely sympathize with 凯 and Rolands; Chinese and Japanese are hard enough without having to translate through a third language.

I wouldn't have said that if he was a girl.

I understand his point, and to a degree I sympathize, but, his problem is not about language, or about accessability, it is about attitude. The hurdle between German and English should not hinder him in learning Chinese. It is a pothole, not a roadblock.

Language learning -- to a certain extent -- is about grinding things out. I wish somebody told me when I was younger that I should "suck it up", that I could learn languages if I put in the time and effort. Instead, I thought that I couldn't learn languages because of some mental deficiency on my part instead of the truth: I was simply making excuses.

Having encountered a fair number of non-native English speakers learning Chinese using English which is their second (or third) language, I am impressed by each one. The effort and determination to overcome the kind of hurdles you speak of, 凯 and Rolands, is great and I applaud your successes. By chance, English is my first language... I wonder if I could learn Chinese using German?

I wish you all well.

Sorry Kai; sounds like the cram mode really got you there. I hope it won't take too long to correct the statistics and get back on track.

Maksym's recently completed word popup allows you to edit the definitions for all the words in a list. In fact, when looking at the popup in a list, there's a button to go to the next word, so you should be able to change the definitions relatively quickly. I hope that can do what you need.

However, if you have a lot of definitions, you should just email them to me and I'll overwrite the current German definitions for those words--it will be faster for me to do it if there are many of them, and I'd bet yours are better than ours.

nick--

I'm happy with my Skritter experience, but I can emphasize with 凯. What I really want is more 中文-中文 definitions, so I can start learning Chinese *in* Chinese.

We know you don't have a small army of employees working on this. So what can we do to help? Should we look for a dictionary in the public domain? And if we find one, edit the entries and send it to you? Should we start plugging in definitions individually (though that seems inefficient, seeing as you will double-check them anyway)?

I guess what I'm asking is, is there anything we can do to speed this along?

A dictionary in the public domain, in electronic format, would be great. Finding good dictionaries is a challenge. A good dictionary would either be government published (so no copyright) or out of copyright (but there would be a lot of modern vocabulary that's missing).

I agree that 中文-中文 would be a great feature for advanced users, maybe Nick can weigh in with more specifics.

I have someone working on a Chinese Wiktionary parsing script for me, which should get a ton of Chinese-Chinese (although I'm sure it'll be missing some things that ended up being unparseable). It'll also get some other languages, but not too many entries. For other languages, it'll be important to find freely usable dictionaries. If you do, send them my way and I can parse them into our format and upload them. (I already spent a while looking and didn't find much, though James already showed me I missed some.)

It's not too important to find big data sources for Chinese-Chinese if this Wiktionary thing works. Once that's in, it will probably need a lot of holes filled and entries corrected, so that's where y'all can help.

@nick Have you looked at these? Many of them seem to be free/GPL etc.

http://www.huzheng.org/stardict-iso/stardict-dic/zh_CN/

There's a Python library "dictdlib" which can read the DICT format if you need it.

James

Best customer support ever!

Awesome new list editor - exactly the thing I was looking forward to; thx a lot to you and your team!

I have looked through almost every one of those dictionaries. The site claims they're GPL, but it's just making that up. Neither Michelle nor I could verify any of them actually being free to use, and several were definitely not. Alas.

Glad that's doing what you want, Kai!

Hmph!