The New List Editor

It's been over a month since this went live for everyone, but it's been taking us quite a while to get through all the new features that have been coming out! The last month truly has been a feature overload.

So we've made this new list editor. The old list editor had a fair number of problems, mostly in terms of usability and speed. It was a bit tough to figure out and use, especially when going through the word validation process. And for longer lists, it could run very, very slowly.


So the new list editor was designed with speed and usability in mind. It's also fully integrated with the list pages themselves, so that instead of going to a separate page to edit a list, you go to the list page itself to make any changes.

The list editor has all the features of the old system and more:

• Paste in large number of words; it parses everything at once
• Search by reading or by writing
• Choose between traditional variants and multiple results
  
• Add words and definitions that are missing from our system

The only thing you can no longer do is edit the whole list at once, or put in all the sections at once. But this really does not slow down the process much (making sure the words you put in are correct takes the most time), and it keeps things simpler and makes it so we no longer have drafts of lists.

Again though, the main improvements are in speed and usability. You can type in a list as if you were typing into a word processor; type the writing or reading, hit enter, repeat. And you can always click the line to edit what you typed in, and navigate the list quickly with the up and down arrows and page up and page down keys. The underlying system is also much more efficient and since you're only editing one section at a time, it never gets too long or too much for the browser to handle. Speed is good!

I've gradually been putting it everywhere vocabulary is edited. It's been used as the way to add words to the queue and I just installed it in the practice nav as the scratchpad editor. Eventually it will be used to edit the queue as well.

Let us know what you think!

Word Popup!

Maksym's new word popup is ready! Its power is vast. It combines the old item progress page with the magnifying glass lookup menu, plus some new controls. Now you can edit definitions or mnemonics or link over to your favorite dictionary from anywhere--in a list, while practicing, in the vocab viewer, in the club, wherever. Many have asked to be able to add mnemonics or edit definitions while making a list; now it'll be easy.

(Click image for a larger view.)

The most exciting part of this is that you now have a quick way to add and remove various parts from the words you're studying. So if you decide that you don't actually want to spend 9 minutes learning to write 打喷嚏 so that you can stump the Chinese, you can just surgically remove that writing part. Or say you want to control whether 嚏 comes up for study by itself: since the decomposition is right there, you can add or remove all of its parts by clicking the plus or minus button next to it, or get another popup for 嚏 itself by clicking on it.

We may include yet more controls and information in here later. Consume it and let us know what's good! From the practice page, you click the magnifying glass for the word or character being prompted, or the component itself for any components in a character decomposition. From other pages, just click the characters.

Raw Squigs Mode

We recently did a poll about the "raw squigs" practice mode, and it turns out that almost everyone who tried it has liked it, but most people have never tried it. So we figured we'd give it a better explanation here.

The idea is to make the practice mode harder and really solidify those characters into your memory. Recognition happens, but your strokes aren't prettified until you've written the whole character, so you're given less hints.

You can try it out in the practice settings. While practicing, click the settings gear in the upper right and look for the "Write raw squigs" option.

This mode also shows you where your strokes were after you complete a character, so you can compare your character's proportions to the standard. We recommend going fast, though, and not worrying about calligraphy too much.

Fashionable Chinese Words and Sentences

This post has a Chinese version below. Feel free to test your Chinese by reading the Chinese version first!

The following words and sentences are popular with the young Chinese people. If a foreigner can speak them, his or her Chinese friends will be impressed and surprised, so let’s learn about them.

Fashionable Chinese words:
1. 顶 (dǐng)
As you know, we can say: 一顶帽子
But if you only know this, you are out of the loop.
Now if you have the similar idea with others and want to agree, you can say: 顶 / 我顶

2. 囧 (jiǒng)
Doesn’t this character look just like an embarrassed face?
Well that is because it really is.
This word became popular just last year, but now it’s one of the hottest words in Chinese youth culture.
When you come across people and things beyond your imagination, but you don’t like them, you can say: 囧，好囧

3.飘过 (piāoguò)
Chinese youth use this phrase on the internet. If one of your friends writes a blog post, and you read it, however, you don’t want to write a long response, you can simply respond with “ 飘过”

Chinese youth also use some fashionable sentences (pinyin and English are below):

1. 我能容忍身材是假的，脸是假的，胸是假的，臀是假的！！！但就是不容忍钱是假的！！！！

2. 我们走得太快了，灵魂都跟不上了。。。。。

3. 还能冲动，表示你还对生活有激情，总是冲动，表示你还不懂生活。


1. 我能容忍身材是假的，
Wǒ néng róngrěn shēncái shì jiǎ de，
I can tolerate fake figure,

脸是假的，
liǎn shì jiǎ de，
fake face,

胸是假的，
xiōng shì jiǎ de，
fake breasts,

臀是假的！！！
and fake hips,
tún shì jiǎ de！！！

但就是不容忍钱是假的！！！！
dàn jiù shì bù róngrěn qián shì jiǎ de！！！！
but I can’t tolerate fake money!


2. 我们走得太快了，
Wǒmen zǒu dé tài kuài le，
We have a high speed development in material life,

灵魂都跟不上了。。。。。
líng hún dōu gēn bù shàng le……
but our soul can’t catch up to it.


3. 还能冲动，
hái néng chōng dòng,
If you are still impulsive,

表示你还对生活有激情，
biǎoshì nǐ hái duì shēnghuó yǒu jī qíng,
it reflects you still have enthusiasm for life.

总是冲动，
zǒngshì chōng dòng
If you are always impulsive,

表示你还不懂生活。
biǎoshì nǐ hái bù dǒng shēnghuó.
it reflects you don’t know what life is.

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Study this post's Chinese vocabulary list (including the sentence) in Skritter or click the word below to add to your Skritter queue:
顶 - dǐng, to agree (slang)
囧 - jiǒng, depressed; chill; embarrassed (slang)
飘过 - 飘过, seen it - to have skimmed

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Chinese Version: You can study the words from this post in Skritter.

汉语潮词潮句

中国的年轻人喜欢说下面这些潮词潮句，如果一个外国人也能这么说，那他的中国朋友一定会大吃一惊，所以让我们来学习它们吧。

潮词

1、顶

正如你知道的，我们会说：一顶帽子。但如果你只会这么说，那你就落伍啦。

现在当我们说：顶，我顶，是指你跟别人想法差不多，并且同意别人的观点。

2、囧

这个汉字像不像人们尴尬时的脸呢？

其实，这个汉字就是用来形容人们的尴尬的。

这个汉字是去年才开始流行的，但现在它已经是中国年轻人文化圈中最热的词之一了。如果你遇到一些超出预料但你又不喜欢的事或者人的时候，你就可以说：囧，好囧。

3、飘过

中国的年轻人喜欢在网上用这个词，如果你的朋友写了一篇博客，你读了后不想写长长的回复，就可以回复说：飘过。

潮句：

1. 我能容忍身材是假的，脸是假的，胸是假的，臀是假的！！！但就是不容忍钱是假的！！！！

2. 我们走得太快了，灵魂都跟不上了。。。。。

3. 还能冲动，表示你还对生活有激情，总是冲动，表示你还不懂生活。

Feature Overload Pt. 6

This here feature is the start of allowing you to study on Skritter in source languages other than English. So if you want to see Russian definitions of your Chinese words or German definitions of your Japanese words, for example, you can start doing that. We've imported a few tons of words from freely available dictionaries, so if you want to learn in one of the languages pairs covered by those, there should be a lot of words done already! To start seeing alternate language definitions, go to the "lang" dropdown in the upper right when you're logged in and choose your tongue.

We've also begun accepting definitions that other users have added for these other languages. So as more users start to use these features and add translations while practicing, we'll gradually build multilingual Chinese and Japanese dictionaries aimed at learners--great! To add a definition in another language, just edit it and use the "submit as correction" checkbox.

I've started off allowing you to choose from ten source languages to start off, just based on popularity, but we could easily add more. Some of these languages don't have many definitions in the system yet, but as we amass more vocabulary sources, they'll start to rock. I'm looking forward to Chinese-Chinese study myself. If your language isn't in the system, and you want to start adding a bunch of translations for it, let me know and I'll add it.

We haven't started translating the rest of the site interface into these languages; that'll be a while later.

Questions? Let us know in the comments!

Feature Overload Pt. 5

This one might be a bit of a surprise, since it's not one of the newsletter features but something we just put up this morning. Yes, it is the long-awaited new progress page! After the last "improvement" we made to this page, it didn't take long to realize we needed something a lot better. Summer Skritter intern Oliver has been working hard to increase the awesomeness on your progress visualization, so take a look!

The big goal here was to let you meaningfully see your progress for all the different types of items you can study on Skritter at a glance while still letting you conveniently get at the more detailed numbers. So there's no more bogus "all" category where the items are added together. And you can now even see a little bit more information than before: character-level vs. word-level retention rates are now available.

On the home page, there's only room for one graph at a time, so you can pick the item category you want to focus on. The full progress page then has the rest of your stats. And the progress reminders have been moved to the Vocabulary Tools area (and updated to show progress on all item categories, as well). If you haven't tried getting progress emails, you should have a try!

Let us know what you think of the new progress stuff. Regularly scheduled feature overloads to resume shortly.