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"The cat is white."
"The fruit is yellow."
"The table is green."
I don't think that these are really sentences and someone really can use them in the reality. Cat isn't necessarily white etc. They can be useful for a songbook: The cat is white, the cat is white, trallala, trallala.
We are adults, aren't we?
Someone who learns a foreign language, in all probability can translate and write sentences with 3-5 words. Though 96% of Tatoeba consists of that short sentences.
If we Tatoeba want to be useful, I think we should write more complicated sentences as well because of excercising the right word order of longer sentences, the usage of comma or semicolon, the conjunctions; we should also write more interjections, onomatopoeic words and figures of speech (eventually with explanation) that one really use in everyday life.
There are plenty of users who writes 10-20 sentences and no more. Why? Tatoeba may not be boring. Tatoeba must be more than a boring schoolbook.
Sometimes I translate like a machine and it doesn't make me pleasure.
Sometimes Tatoeba seems to be a competition among nations - no más.
Perhaps they are useful for people who just start learning a new language. Some languages are difficult and it's always good to start with some short sentences. If you don't want to translate them, you may find something more interesting.
But I agree with you on another point. Many of these short sentences are near-duplicates, like "Tom is tall" / "John is tall" or "The car is green" / "The car is yellow". These duplicates are really tedious to translate and aren't helpful.
> We are adults, aren't we?
Undoubtedly, some of us are not. I would hope that some teenagers and even younger children use this site. Diversity is a great thing, not only in terms of users, but in terms of sentences. There are purposes served by short sentences (among others, they're easy to remember), and there are purposes served by long ones (for instance, they can provide a sense of context). Furthermore, the length of a sentence is not the greatest predictor of how interesting people will find it.
Writing sentences that are both interesting and useful to language learners is an art. Prior to the Internet, it was a skill that only textbook writers and language teachers needed to master. Some of the people who contribute here are good at it. Others might be good at it if they invested the time, but they're too busy with other things. That's okay.
I think that it is worthwhile to encourage people to write diverse sentences rather than use the fill-in-the-blank approach (varying only the name, or the color, or the pronoun, or the tense). But some people will always write simple sentences. The best thing we can do for people who want to contribute translations is give them the opportunity to come up with ways to find the sentences that are most interesting to them. I think we already do that to some extent (for instance, by letting users search by sentence length, or randomly, or by sentence author). Suggestions of other ways would be welcome.
>> Many of these short sentences are near-duplicates, like "Tom is tall" / "John is tall" or "The car is green" / "The car is yellow". These duplicates are really tedious to translate and aren't helpful.
Near duplicates may be near duplicates in some languages and not in others. If Tatoeba will become as large as we hope it will someday, it will incorporate all types of languages with all types of noun classes/declensions/etc. Some languages differentiate between 'gender', animate/inanimate, whether the noun is possessed or its relative use to humans, whether it is part of a greater whole, etc. Even 'yellow' could be interpreted differently in different languages. And let's not even mention verbs (though I will, very briefly): verbs like 'go' can vary if you are on foot/in vehicle or going uphill/downhill in other languages.
> Even 'yellow' could be interpreted differently in different languages
I don't think 'yellow' will have a different form from 'green' in any language.
Can you come up with a language where 'The car is yellow' and 'The car is green' wouldn't be near duplicates?
>Can you come up with a language where 'The car is yellow' and 'The car is green' wouldn't be near duplicates?
It depends what you mean by "near duplicates". I.e. in Italian the word "yellow" is depended on its noun's gender, and the word "green" is not. And the word "pink" is an exeption, that isn't depended even on its noun's number, unlike most ajectives.
I've given a concrete example. If we don't change the subject, i.e. the car, I think we can take any color from a dictionary and make a near duplicate.
The car is yellow.
The car is red.
The car is blue.
And I think it's useless to accumulate such examples if we already have one.
If you are right about Italian, maybe I'm wrong and these examples could be useful.
Yes, we can just take colours from a dictionary as they are when we make such sentences in English. In Italian it's a bit more complicated.
The car is red. - La macchina e' rossa.
The cars are red - Le macchine sono rosse.
(We have to take the word "rosso" in a proper form which depends on both number and gender).
The car is green. - La maccina e' verde.
The cars are green. - Le macchine sono verdi.
(The word "verde" doesn't depend on gender, only on number).
The car is blue. - La macchina e' blu.
The cars are blue. - Le macchine sono blu.
(The word "blu" is one of a few words, that doesn't depends neither on gender nor on number, but most of those words seems to be colour names, btw :)
If you want more trustworthed opinions, you can ask someone of Italian contributors.
I got your idea. The same situation in Spanish. Some adjectives are gender-dependent like
The car is red = El coche es rojo
The door is red = La puerta es roja
Others are gender-independent like
The car is pink = El coche es rosa
The door is pink = La puerta es rosa
Perhaps you are right, some near-duplicates are useful to have.
Sure, Italian and Spanish have many similar grammar rules.
I share your opinion as well. I didn't wrote that they weren't useful. I just wrote that there are many differences among languages that someone can't really learn from books only by practice. These are the order of pronouns etc. that I wrote.
I hardly know some languages and I'm pleased to study short sentences. And I know some languages on a higher level, though not perfectly, but I want my knowledge to be better.
(It's fairly relative whether a sentence is interesting. Nevertheless a longer sentence has more chance to be.)
Those simple sentences are useful for beginners.
It might be a good idea to mark sentences like "beginner's", "intermediate", "advanced" levels in order to avoid that kind of problem you mentioned.
Yes singular and plural is useful in Swedish & Finnish. Not so much in English.
Bilen är grön - Car is green
Bilarna är gröna - The cars are green