Hey wonderful Scritter Team,

I apologize if this has already been discussed (a quick look didn't seem to bring it up), but it would be hugely helpful to me to have a list of sample words with their definitions as a Mnemonic for a Chinese Character. I'm using Skritter for characters, rather than words, but knowing a few words a new character is in would help a great deal. OK, I know I could enter thousands of these by hand, but there are plenty of dictionary sites with such lists. Any chance this might make it to the feature list? Or does it exist and I somehow overlooked it?

There's a great web site that jochemb set up to let you find words that use a given set of characters:

http://huygens.functor.nl/skritter/wordlist/

James

That looks helpful, though not quite what I'm looking for. I'm looking to use a short word list as mnemonics or example sentences, in order to learn new characters better.

Yeah this would make a nice addition to the sample sentences, like a top 10 of the most frequently words that contain the character that is being studied.

In parallel to "Skrittering", I am always using Wenlin to look up characters. It allows "Show me all characters containing this character" and "Show me all words containing this character", in addition, it also shows the development over the centuries of this character plus explainations taken from karlgren, etc.. As I have learnt more than 2500 characters already, I now have difficulties in distinguishing characters, e.g. 浩(hao) and 洁(jie). In this case I use Wenlin to search for the similar character. It would be very nice, if at some time in the future Skritter would also offer such kind of functionality, so no need for a second tool or a look up on some web-pages.

+1 on Roland's ideas. They sound like great potential additions to the detail popup.

Second to James' idea: in the popup, so not cluttering my prompt :p.

You know, we've finally uploaded the character/word frequency we'll need in order to implement this. This was actually part of the word popup design a very long time ago, but we were waiting on that piece. Now that we have it, it shouldn't be very hard to implement. I will see if we can wiggle it in there sometime after the vocabulary redesign goes up.

Okay, this is in alpha now, in the word popup for individual characters. Let me know what you think!

From reading this forum thread I thought this feature would just be a bother but it's useful, I like it! I've tried it for a couple of characters so far - for each I got a list of four words using that character and then I could click on that word for another popup with an example. It could go on and on...

On a related note - I was tempted to add a word to the queue but I wondered what happened to the notion of making the queue a list. Did that get implemented, I don't remember reading about it?

Glad to hear it! I did the same thing, opening endless popups.

Queue into list: it's going to be a while. We're waiting to finish this new vocab design before tackling that sort of thing. When it does happen, you'll be able to see all those old queue words in there.

I just tried it. Awesome!

I just started playing around with it. That is a nice little feature. I don't know how often I will use it, but I really like it.

+1 on that. The only problem is that I have to much fun adding new "fun" words this way;-). I found it very useful both as an reference and for actually add new words. Mostly i use it when I have a a new character to see other words where this char is used to get an idea of the usage.

One slight problem. Sometimes the word you are writing shows up amongst the sample words. While you are working on a writing queue, this invalidates the writing attempt.

It isn't a big deal to me, but if that can be dealt with a lot of people would probably appreciate it.

I think the word popup has a lot of ways to invalidate the current word being written; I don't make any effort to not do that. Would be tricky.

oooh, I like it a lot more than I expected I would.

FYI 前面 is in there twice under 面, one time it is defined, the second time it is a place holder

Nick,
Just to be sure - you wrote about the queue redesign: "When it does happen, you'll be able to see all those old queue words in there." Do you mean that things I put in the queue *now* will eventually get swept into this new queue-with-custom-list-properties? If so, then I'll be adding items with a simple click rather than my relatively clumsy editing of a custom list.

I think I know what's up with 前面; thanks, that'll help me solve another issue I was puzzled about!

Yes, the items you add now will all be there eventually.