One of the most effective methods for me of vocab and, especially, grammar study is copying out sentences. I would LOVE it if there were some way to do this with Skritter. Really I wouldn't want anything complicated -- pretty much just the ability to build my own list of sentences, see a random sentence in its entirety, and write the characters one by one (and then rate myself on how well I know that sentence's grammar). Right now I do this with Anki, but obviously that requires me to use pen and paper as well.

No idea whether anyone else would want this, and I can appreciate that there might be a certain aesthetic "untidiness" to having this in Skritter, but since it would be useful to me just thought I'd suggest it anyway.

I guess that would be nice to be able to write sentences once you get to a certain level. There are already some phrases several characters long but maybe the ability to write full sentences would help the grammar aspect, which is something I really struggle with.

I asked this exact question over here: http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=237660198

Currently, since no one had expressed interest, we were planning on enabling just reading/definition study for sentences, not writing/tones. This is something we could add an option for if more people actually want to write out the whole thing. We are loathe to add options that aren't going to see a lot of use, though.

More thoughts?

Thanks for your response, glad this is something you're considering. Missed that forum post. The way you asked the question there (quite naturally since it was phrased concisely) doesn't suggest what the usefulness of being able to copy sentences in Skritter might be -- i.e., a way of concentrating on and internalizing the grammar of the sentence, not checking to make sure you really do know how to write each 他 and 是 -- and I'm not sure people are necessarily going to be thinking in that direction. As a study method, it probably seems a bit "Asian" for Westerners; I know I wouldn't have thought to try it had the best student in my Chinese class, a Japanese girl, not suggested it to me when I asked her how she studied. So it wouldn't be surprising to me if people were uninterested in it before trying it but liked it once they did. Of course, if your perception is that that feature would go unused, makes total sense not to add it in.

Well, you can actually try it right now, because we haven't implemented the code that makes it so that the writing/tone parts don't get added when you add a sentence.

1) Go on http://beta.skritter.com/study/all
2) Click the "change" button that shows up next to some sentence that you're prompted with
3) Find a sentence that you want to study, or create a new one from that popup
4) Click the horrific magnifying glass in the sentence list for that sentence
5) Click the sentence's quick-add button (the plus) in its word popup

Act now if you want to try it out. ;)

I had no idea you could do that... but this makes the sentences count as a word, wont it?

The sentences count as words, yes. You can currently do all the same things with them as words. Later, you just won't be able to add the writing/tone parts for them. In fact, I just turned a bunch of existing words into sentences using a script to identify really long ones.

Does that mean I wont see writing prompts for long expressions, such as 醉翁之意不在酒, once the new system is implemented?

If you've already added them, you'll still have them. They just won't add after we make the change. And 醉翁之意不在酒 won't be turned into a sentence--it was segmented as one word, and this will only happen to things which segment as five or more words.

So this is what you are using the text segmenter for? It all sounds very neat.

My sentence finally showed up in my reviews. I like it! Writing does help. Takes a long time though for just one 'word' review. So I guess it would be usefull to be able to set sentence writing off (but keep word writing)

So we can study sentences now? How? I couldn’t find that option.

You can study a sentence from a word popup for the sentence, which you can get to from the sentence chooser popup. Later we'll make a quick add button in the sentence chooser popup itself.