Update on Skritter iOS App →

April 28, 2012 ·

Scott from Skritter just posted an update about the Skritter iOS app to the Skritter forums:

The iOS app is getting close! We’ve only got a handful of bugs to fix and things to do (as well as the Apple submission process).

One of the last larger items we’re finishing up is the demo/tutorial for when you first download the app. Newcomers can pick one of the textbooks we offer and are shown the basics of Skritter using words from that list. We’d like to offer as many languages as possible for the definitions, so I’ve made a list of all the words that could possibly be studied in the demo for our ballers to polish and fill in the gaps.

Leiden Weibo Corpus →

April 28, 2012 · · [via Confused LaoWai]

Daan van Esch just released a corpus consisting of 5.1 million Sina Weibo messages from January 2012. Even better, he included a variety of helpful search features and statistics. He notes some of his observations and will soon publish a thesis using this corpus.

Tatoeba Sentence Scraper →

April 17, 2012 ·

I love the idea of example Chinese sentences. But, I’m so new to Chinese that it is difficult to find sentences at my level. Sometimes I luck out when I look up a word in Pleco, but most of the time I strike out.

kasik from the Skritter forum wrote a script that scans Tatoeba’s Chinese sentences for those that consist only of characters you know. He has it up and running with a text file exported from Skritter, but I’m guessing that making it work with Pleco or Anki is straightforward.

He asked if people want it posted online. Yes, please.

nciku Q&A Board and Soso WenWen Share Data →

April 15, 2012 ·

In order to provide a more active and professional Q&A platform, we’ve just started a cooperation between the nciku Q&A and Tecent Soso Wenwen. Questions and answers on both sites will be shared so that you can get help from more native Chinese speakers, as well as helping Soso Wenwen users with their English questions. We will mark the questions and answers from Soso Wenen as “搜搜问问网友”.

I think I’ll start using nciku Q&A now.