This isn't really a Skritter question, but I think there may be someone here who can answer it, rather than in the Anki forum.

I've been entering characters into Anki so I can review them individually. I am currently using Chinese Conversation 301 (? it's on Skritter, anyway). I set the Mac to pinyin, then enter, say, jia, which turns into 家, and Anki fills in the meaning and pronunciation. In this case the meaning is '(a surname)'. I have to add 'family' myself.

Why is this common meaning missing? Is it the Anki support that has the problem? not the Mac, I suppose. This has happened with four or five common words. Maybe I have an out-of-date version? I realize it's lazy just to accept what Anki gives me, but is there any way I can get better software support?

TIA

Margaret

Are you using the Pinyin Toolkit? If so, I'd have thought it'd be using Google Translate to do the translations. Anyway, even if it does use Google Translation, you often have to massage the definition and reading manually.

By the way, you can export a list from Skritter and then import it into Anki, and it'll automatically get whatever definitions Skritter is using. That might be easier in this case.

James

Thanks, James. But I don't think this can be Google Translate. Or can it? It gives me a main meaning and several sub-meanings, usually OK.

The problem with exporting from Skritter is that I don't want the Skritter-type list. I want individual characters. I don't want any words consisting of more than one character. I can live with it on Twitter - for instance, there is a woman's name LiuJing that it keeps asking me even though I got it right first time. And it keeps wanting xiexie, which means writing the same character twice.

I realize that Skritter want to practice all vocabulary lists by repetition. But I want to do what I used to do with flashcards: just practice the characters, not keep repeating two- and three-character words. I can learn the words anyway. Nor do I want the example sentences, which I never read. If I export from Twitter, I have more editing to do than if I create a new list in Anki. I might later import the Anki list to Skritter, because at the moment I am using Skritter as it stands.

Margaret

Sorry, I meant 'I can live with it on Skritter', not Twitter!

Margaret

You can export only characters. That I used to make a poster once passed 1000 character limit.

StEskil is correct, if you go to http://www.skritter.com/vocab/mywords and click "Export" there is an option to export only characters.

James

Oh, excellent - I had no idea. Thanks very much to StEskil and James. That will save effort, and I think there are fewer omissions and mistakes (if any).

Margaret

But you can only do it with words you've already studied. So you have to go through the Skritter process with words first. You can export a whole list from a book, but only the words.

Margaret

You're right, there's no way to say "export only characters" when exporting a list. It would be nice to have the same option in both cases; maybe the Skritter developers will think about adding that ability if they think it's a good idea.

In the meantime, one workaround would be to remix the list, then edit the remixed list to delete whatever you don't want to study, then export the remix. You can also do the same in Anki; after you import everything, you can delete whatever cards you don't want.

James

Yes, but I want to study everything, so every double combination (word) would have to be separately reentered after I've deleted it. It will be quicker with Anki. And actually, I tried importing 30 words to Anki, and it didn't work uniformly, though I think I will just have to inspect the file and add some more tab stops. Sometimes the meaning and pinyin came across in one field, sometimes in two.

(I have been trying to pick up Chinese again after 35 years, did quite a lot in Skritter, now I have started from scratch with a new book which is used in evening classes here, hoping to do 17 easy chapters in a couple of weeks before the term starts and then jump in - so I would like to concentrate on the book and not spend so long entering words).

Thanks for information,

Margaret

@zeppa Sorry, I don't understand. Earlier you wrote

"The problem with exporting from Skritter is that I don't want the Skritter-type list. I want individual characters. I don't want any words consisting of more than one character."

but now you're saying

"Yes, but I want to study everything, so every double combination (word) would have to be separately reentered after I've deleted it."

so I am quite confused about whether you want single characters only or whether you also want words.

James

Sorry for confusion - I do only want single characters. What I mean is that each of the two parts of every 'word' in Skritter would have to be entered separately as individual characters. Thus for a word like 爸爸 I would enter just one character, whereas for 天气 I would enter two separate characters. So just deleting the compound is not the end of the story.

Actually I've tried to import a tab-delimited file into Anki without success. It wasn't completely successful when I did 31 characters, but with a whole book it seems to have a problem. Maybe it's a Pinyin Toolkit problem. But although I created three fields, the import thinks there is just one. So I'm back to entering characters into Anki individually.

Margaret