@ CK
Please, bear in mind that many languages have different forms of verbs and adjectives for males and females. For example, "Tom swam" and "Mary swam" should be said differently in Russian. Also, "they" can mean "Tom and John", "Tom and Mary" or "Many and Jane". In some languages these variants required of using different grammatic forms.

So, maybe in English these variants seem like "near duplicates", but for translators into some languages the situation can be different.

I don't know what you mean as "difficult" in this case.

I just want to say, many people use English sentences as basics to create a number of translations in their own languages. But English grammar is rather simple comparing to grammar of many other languages. So it seems to me it's not a very good idea to put the rules, that can artificially deprive people of opportunities to show features of the grammar of their languages...

I completely agree with Selena.

It's not so difficult, but it was one of the hardest aspect for me when I studied French. You need to remember many things and practice a lot to get accustomed to it. I can't find any reason why Tatoeba shouldn't help learners practice.

A moderate competent speaker wouldn't need many of your sentences.

Sometimes I think it might be better if our main character were a woman. In the languages I know, it's grammatically the easiest to talk about a single male person.

But in this case CK proposed to change Jason to Tom, so male to male, which is completely OK, no? Of course, one would need also the sentence "Mary was caught ..."

Oh, yes, we're talking about the general principle.

See also: http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentence...2883#comments.

@ PaulP

My remark is more related to the link, that CK put above.

Yes, Selena and Tommy_san, I understand it now. And I agree on your point of view!

Meanwhile, I also think that if there's a good sentence about Tom, it's maybe not really difficult to get an equally good sentence about Mary or Alice or whoever, so in the long run, it might not be worth spending our precious time now writing and translating sentences about many different people.

I think it's an obvious point of inequality if we prefer a single name to all the others, and since there's no hard-wired reason to, this inequality needn't exist at all.

To avoid making near-duplicates, those who don't want to have to check the base every time since it takes time away could just contribute longer items since the commonest platitudes have been largely exhausted in the languages on top of the list, I suppose.

Besides, learning which names are common in the target language is also part of language learning and I'd rather do it naturally than going to a name site and sullenly reading through lists.

"earning which names are common in the target language is also part of language learning"

I agree. But for simplest sentences we would have lots of near duplicates. "Tom sings", "John sings", "Jack sings", etc. So, using a defoult name is a good solution. Though if a single sentence is rather long the situation is different and we wouldn't have many duplicates so we can use any name, what we want, in my opinion.
Actually, I don't feel very comfortable with using "Tom" in my original Russian sentences. It's not a typically Russian name at all...

That's why I'd suggest retaining some basic namepool for platitudes, commonplace phrases, but giving a free choice for longer sentences, likely to remain unique.
Plus I'd support the idea of each languages having its own set of default names. As it is, Tom is very much English, which also constitutes a point of inequality.

@Ooneykcall
I agree.