So, I’ve recently started trying to carefully choose example sentences to improve my retention of characters that are parts of words. For example, I have only usually come across 异 in the word 差异 so I wanted to add a sentence to 异 such as 这两张图片之间有细致的差异 from yellowbridge. But Skritter tells me that sentence already exists and won’t let me add it. Why not? This isn’t the only example and I’ve come across it several times now, like with 德 or 奇 or 巴. Incidentally 巴 only gives me options of sentences in Spanish about someone called Paula which aren’t the most memorable!
P.S. What’s with the (mostly) tatoeba sentences that say [placeholder–unavailable word; will add soon.]? Some of them don’t have English on tatoeba itself but many do.
@Catherine you never tagged me on this post so now I missed it Apologies!
You’re getting the the error because the example you’ve mentioned already exits in our system (although it’s tied to the word (差异 and not 异). The sample sentence system leaves much to be desired and it doesn’t work exactly how it should. Like many other things on the site, we’re in the process of rebuilding it to be better and more beneficial for Skritter users.
I’m not sure why you’re seeing some example about “Paula” for 巴, as it should display the following:
Are you seeing this on iOS or on the web?
As for the placeholder note, it shows up on sentences that don’t have any English translation. Either because the user who entered the sentence into our system didn’t translate it, or because the translation wasn’t available when the data was originally scraped from Tatoeba and other site. Again… much to be desired.
We’ll be making some minor changes to the existing feature that should give us more control over the types of sentences you’re seeing for items, but eventually we’re just going to scrap what we’ve got and start over from scratch.
Hope that helps answer your questions and sorry about the slow reply!
Thanks for the response @SkritterJake! My current workaround is to edit the sentences very slightly (e.g. 他 to 她) when inputting to allow me to add them to words they’re not associated with. In the app I star any words that have weird sentences and then go through them on the computer every now and then, so it’s not as slick as it could be but not the end of the world.
The image below shows what I get for 巴; there are several pages by the same user and I don’t see the sentence you show above.
@pts anything you’ve created will stay. We are moving toward hand curated sentences for entries but users will still be able to create their own sentences if they want. The major overhaul is focused on the voting system, how sentences get updated on the client, and culling some of the bad data mined stuff we currently have on the site.
Apologies!
