My students have been greatly looking forward to the new kana functionality in Skritter, but were somewhat disappointed when they found out that words containing kanji are still tested using the kanji, instead of the kana reading alone. They use Skritter mainly to learn new words, not necessarily new kanji.
Could full kana functionality be implemented?
SkritterJake January 23rd, 2015 7:12p.m.
Hi Yomar,
What you’ve described above does sound very reasonable. The biggest challenge is figuring out whether we can find an elegant solution that doesn’t require another setting, or how something like this would be handled on Japanese accounts. I’ve added the request to our list of potential future features and we’ll certainly spend some time thinking about ways to implement something like this.
Thanks for the feedback!
-Jake and The Skritter Team
Yomar January 23rd, 2015 7:17p.m.
You’re welcome!
My students will be really looking forward to that feature then!
I think an extra setting would be the best solution, so that people can choose whether to answer in kana or kanji.
Jay Andrew Allen February 2nd, 2015 12:08a.m.
I second this. Words that are commonly spelled using kana should have the option of showing up in kana.
In fact, there is already a similar setting indicating whether you want to write rare kanji too. Why not build on that and let users choose to:
Answer in rare kanji
Answer in non-rare kanji
Answer in kana
It’s important to realize that students of Japanese have an entirely different background compared to students of Chinese: they can postpone learning all the kanji until they get a basic grasp of grammar and vocabulary. Also, easy kanji do not necessarily represent easy words and vice versa: it’s very common for Japanese students to study kanji and words separately (in the end the roads converge), but it would be great for them to use the same app for both.
Thanks for bringing this topic to the new forum! @josh and I were talking about some planned Japanese app improvements yesterday and we’ll certainly be taking these things into consideration when we’re ready to move forward to Japanese app updates.