I was critized because I use to post question about chinese grammar. Someone said that he was fed up with these tutorial services. I´d like to ask him/her what they use the forum for. To interchange gossips about Hollywood stars?

To be honest I found your questions very strange, very badly written and very confusing. I am all for reading peoples question and on many occasions these questions have helped me personally. Yours just give me a headache. I assume you are personally studying Chinese? Where are you from?

I haven't seen anything about Hollywood...

Hi Maggie, please forgive me, judging by your English im "guessing" you are German and over 40?

Anyway, we use the forum for all things relating to Skritter. Questions on the use of skritter and device issues and bugs.

We may ask about certain characters but the forum has never really had anyone aksing chinese language questions as most skritter users are here to learn characters and nothing much more than that.
We use other resources to learn everything else about chinese language. Therefore no one really wants to see basic chinese questions on the forum. If you are late for an exam, skritter would be last on my list for "grammer" help. I would use my textbooks for such issues, or ask a chinese person.

Some people may be nasty on forums and I am not one of them, we appreciate you need help with your studies but I think most people are annoyed to see your posts (many) asking very basic chinese questions.

My advice is to learn chinese language with other resources and return to skritter when you will actually want to learn characters. If you need help on character writing then this is the place to ask!

Hope this helps and sorry if the forum has made you feel bad.

All the best and keep at it!
Regards
Tim

I agree that this forum is pretty much used for things related to Skriter. It's not a great resource for asking questions related to Chinese grammar, though I don't mind trying to answer those from time to time, but I am no expert. Most of us aren't as we are non-native speakers, that's why I recommended Lang 8. It is full of native speakers and it seemed like a better site for the type of questions you were asking.

I did take some issue with how your questions were written. They, at times, were unclear and it seemed (correct me if I'm wrong) as if you didn't read through them before posting. It's difficult to answer questions I don't understand and after awhile it becomes frustrating to try.

Anybody seen Jessica Alba lately? She is looking nice.

This post is harsh, and I'm sorry in advance.

I am so confused. According to the majority above, we only ask "questions that are related to Skritter." Whats even more ironic is these people are attacking Maggie's English skills. This post will attempt to demystify what “actually relates to Skritter” and understand why users are paying subscription fees to use this wonderful spaced rep program:

Why are we all on Skritter? To put up with the (very few) bugs? Then we can all cultivate on the forums and complain/seek advice on bug related issues? Sounds silly to me. Skritter is used to learn Chinese. By learn Chinese, I mean we learn how to write, and read Chinese. I have learned many grammar structures on Skritter because of the example sentences. I have also learned how to pen 1000 characters. Are we all in agreement then? Skritter is NOT just used to complain about bugs; we use Skritter for educational purposes too. I can confidently write learning Chinese relates to Skritter, and therefore questions should be asked about Chinese. Does everyone see why I was confused?

Good. We agree. I hope. If not, read on....

So....

When someone writes we can only "ask questions which are related to Skritter" I am confused, both by the logic of your English, and the fact you are attacking an ELL's language ability. I find it quite ironic that many of you have attacked a second language learner, when many (if not all of us) are second language learners. Its outright disrespectful. How would you feel if a Chinese person was all like: “別問別問。 我不要看你的問題， 因爲你的中文很差。I don't think a Chinese person would EVER say that to anybody who was putting in the blood, sweat, and tears to learn Chinese. Why are we degrading someone based on their language ability, simply because we have a mother tongue advantage?

Can you tell that I am an educator, and that I get really heated when people are shut down for learning purposes? Again, I'm sorry if my wordsmith stems offence (and thank you for reading this far).

On top of all this disrespectful second language crap, we have people who say the forum is not a free tutoring service. What do you want her to do? Pay a fee? Send you some RMB or NTD in the mail? I thought the PURPOSE of a forum was to ask questions (and since I've (hopefully) proved that “things related to Skritter” include all things related to Chinese, and learning Chinese), I think Maggie's questions are valid.

Need I point to Hacking' Chineses for support? http://www.hackingchinese.com/

Search: Use the benefits of teaching to boost your own learning

Ultimately I am frustrated with people who attempt to shut down someone who is trying to learn. I think it is rude, ironic, disrespectful, and degrading to our community.

My suggested solution: if you don't want to read her “terrible English” then don't. If you don't want to help someone out, then don't. But you have no grounds to attack someone for A) their language ability (we are all second language learners here), and B), wanting to seek help with Chinese, because Chinese learning is VERY MUCH related to Skritter.

I rest my case.
勇氣

I agree with Tim.

Sorry, but Skritter == Chinese just isn't true. By that logic we should also ask Japanese questions, because there are Japanese learners, ask questions about the internet, because skritter is a website, and so on.

As the skritter forum doesn't feature categories it would just get really messy. So to summerize, why it is a bad idea to handle these kind of questions:
- no proper structure for the questions being asked
- searching for them is hard. This one is actually on Maggie's fault using titles like "I need help" instead of actual useful ones
- harder for skritter people to actually see the topics that concern THEM, because of "flooding"
- there are platforms which have a lot more resources, and don't have to deal with all the issues raised above.

I guest the last reason is also why people recommend different places. Not because about some religion that "it doesn't belong here", but because it's a waste. A waste for Maggie to have to wait for an answer, while one was already given somewhere else. And a waste for the people who take time to help, because it was already said (and it will most likely help one person).

Also I seem to miss the point here. This is already the second topic dealing with this issue. If people make you feel bad, and I'm sorry for that, then take the advice you already got and find solutions to your problems somewhere else OR ignore them, hope that someone is going on to help you and keep going. Discussing this over and over again won't change anyone's mind.

how does Skritter not = Chinese and Japanese? I'm boggled. Why is it a crime to post a grammar question? I'm sorry my original post neglected the Japanese learners.

I will say again that I personally am not bothered about seeing questions in the Skritter forum. But I will contradict you on 'The main role of the forum is the pedagogic function.' Firstly, the main role of a 'Skritter Forum' is to discus 'Skritter.' Whatever pedagogical function this forum may or may not have, it is secondary to its primary function as a means to discuss Skritter.

This is the second occasion on which you've made one of these useless posts which simply functions on the lines of 'X say Y, but I disagree.' Frankly, I think this post should be deleted and in all honesty I think you're trolling.

Ask questions if you want to. If people want to answer they can, but I don't see the point in these sorts of posts because they're neither about Skritter, nor about Chinese.

And as a continental European speaking German and French, I really think you should reread your posts before your hit the 'ok' button because some of the English makes absolutely no sense.

@Klooste, once again I am in awe of your passion for language learning. It is a sight to behold :-)

However, I agree with everyone else. When you go to post on these forums it states that "the forum should be for discussion with other Skritterers." So I don't think people mind that questions are not always related to Skritter, because they are between Skritter users. That might seem exclusive, but there are many forums on the net and this one has been created by the Skritter Overlords for discussion between Skritterers.

@Skritter Overlords...do you agree or disagree?

I also agree with @tainted on the "trolling" comment. There were plenty of great replies to Maggie (@rmzhao82 comes to mind) suggesting some great websites where she would get better and more targeted advice than Skritter or asking for clarifications to questions she asked...with no answer whatsoever.

OK, my two sentences on that topic: Use the forum for Skritter and other general Chinese-related topics, but what I personally found most disturbing was that half the overview of the forum threads was about single sentence inquiries from one specific user. I personally think in an exceptional way in this forum you can (and the ppl effectively DO) help users with translation issues and similar, but if for every new sentence one single user opens a new thread, I think this is too much. If you want to have a Tutoring thread just for your sentence translations, I wouldn't mind, though, but please do not create a new thread always. There are other forums which are dedicated exclusively on these topics and it would certainly fit better there.

I am cool with that but only if @本杰明 can have his own Jessica Alba thread replete with gossip and photos...

It appears to me that a lot of the issues being discussed would benefit greatly from Skritter (us) building a better forum... once that is complete with stickied threads, Chinese/ Japanese specific language sections, and a place for everyone to discuss what's on their minds.

I will discuss this with the rest of the Skritter team to figure out where something like this would fall in our development cycle, and if it would be included on the current version of the site, on as part of the upgrades that are planned for the future.

While the Skritter forum doesn't have specific rules or moderators, we do ask that everyone posting on the forum be respectful and courteous to others and use your best judgment when creating and replying to topics.

Thanks!

I think this forum is a great place to find direction. I personally won't answer Maggie's posts because i lack the knowledge to do so. But it bother's me a bit that she types chinese in pinyin rather than trying to use the chinese characters themselves.

Maggie, these types of questions have a better place to be. In my opinion it's on italki, but someone else has already suggested lang-8.com . In fact i learned about chinese pod and italki in this forum and love those sites. As long as you keep getting replies from this forum i guess you're free to keep posting questions but maybe you should test italki or lang-8. They are free.

If the forum had sections for people asking questions there would have to be people with an active interest in replying to them or else everyone would just skip those sections. This is what sites like italki or lang-8 try to do. Chinese pod does it way better because it's a paid service. In my opinion skritter just doesn't have the dimension to hire someone to keep replying to user's questions but users help each other and show you where you can find better help.

Maggie, have you checked out http://www.chinese-forums.com ?

It is discussion group for all things Chinese.