Details on the new 3.5.1 features

I just tried out the music decks and saw the added video. I felt it was nice. I wasn’t really into the music selection so much. Recently I have been listening to the Japanese version of Country Roads. Is there any chance that could be added to the list?

P.S. The Puffy AmiYumi video isn’t working. BTW I think it’s really cool that you can tell at a glance how much studying you’ll need to do to sing a song with Skritter.

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@ddapore99 Jeremy is doing his thing with the music list, so I leave that choice up to him. However, if you make a custom study deck for the song toss us the link we’ll embed the video into the deck and you can publish it to share! Currently, this is an admin-only feature while we clean up the entire deck browsing, tagging, and sharing experience. But, we’ll happily include it into your video

@ddapore99 I’ve added this to the list! :smiley:

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ありがとう

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I wanted to work on some mnemonics for that list. I could see it in the app but not on the legacy site. I would prefer to edit it on the Legacy site since it is easier to type on a keyboard. Moreover I can dig into the character breakdowns and create mnemonics for them much more easily if need be. Also sometimes I want to look stuff up and find primitives not listed in the breakdown and MyWords on Legacy works much better. In addition to that I was thinking of adding sentence lyrics from the song in the sentence section and that is only possible in legacy as far as I know. Do you think you could get it to appear on the Legacy site as well?

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Ah, it’s the very last section in the first Learning Japanese through Music list (the one that doesn’t have a Part listed). That’s a bit counter intuitive sorry about that. I should probably clean it up to remove the individual part lists!

I’m sorry but I can’t seem to see the the first Learning Japanese through Music list (the one that doesn’t have a Part listed) on the Legacy site. Could you provide a link?

Sure! https://legacy.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=5650531526246400

It’s actually the first link in the screenshot you posted earlier

ありがとう

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@SkritterJake what is your current focus for the next update? I would appreciate if you can prioritize the navigation throughout the entire UI, since it is really a pain to scroll through huge new textbook decks. Whenever you hit “back” it jumps to the very first section again instead of staying at section number X.

PS. The Syncing time before I start my review session has unfortunately got pretty long recently. It sometimes takes up to several minutes to load. I also fresh installed the beta, but it didn’t help.

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If I could add +1000 thumbs up to comment of the weird jumping back to the top behavior of manipulating decks, I would!!

Can you explain the pain point a bit more? 3.5.1 did improve the deck scroll experience greatly. If you navigate into a deck section and then press the back button it remembers your location on the deck’s main screen. It does this on the word level as well if you tap into an item and then go back. Are you not seeing this behavior? If that is the case, a screen recording would be helpful in figuring out what is happening.

What the app doesn’t do at the moment, is remember your position when you’re moving around in My Library, Browse, or Featured tabs. Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple solution to this issue, and rather hacking something together temporarily only to redo it in a few months, we’re going to tackle it all in one go. In the meantime, I’d recommend using the Search feature to quickly navigate to Decks.

As for what we’re currently working on-- 3.6.0 is a Progress and Goal-oriented release. Learn, Test, and Review activities will all be tracked and saved to the server. Daily Goals will be in the app, and study streaks will start counting beyond a one-month period.

After that, we’re tackling supporting custom entries to the Skritter database, supporting custom example sentences (and the ability to make them in the app), and a few other things that are missing from the Skritter experience.

We feel your pain on the textbook navigation. There is a lot of room for improvement. We took a stab at fixing this issue with the 3.5.0 release but ran into a few roadblocks along the way, and I made the decision to bundle the fix into a larger Browse/Deck/My Library update we have planned for 3.9.0.

Please send team@skritter.com an email so @josh can get a dialogue going. We’ve gotten some reports of this from a few users apart from you, but we haven’t been able to reproduce things on our end yet. We’d love to fix this elusive bug!

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Let me explain:

Let’s say you click on a textbook deck which has 100 sections. Then you scroll down to section 98 (even though there are sections which you haven’t completed before, just because the vocabulary wasn’t useful to you). Then let’s assume section no. 98 has 100 words in it. Then, You scroll down to word no. 99 because all other words in this section aren’t useful. Then you learn/add this word no. 99 to you’re review list. NOW, what Skritter does is, it will not stay at word no.99 in section 98. Although it would make much sense because I likely want to study/add word no.100 from this section 98. Instead, Skritter will not only leave that position inside the section. Moreover, it will bring you out of this section and go back to the top of the section overview of your textbook deck.

What is the consequence? Not only do I have to remember that I was just in section no. 98. No, I also have to scroll all the way down to section no. 98 AND THEN inside that section, AGAIN I have to scroll all the way down to word no. 100 which I maybe want to add.

This process is very annoying. I sometimes like to look through new textbooks if I can find new helpful vocabulary. And in many cases I do; but due to this process it really is a pain and takes up too much time. You should definitely reproduce this.

And what I don’t understand is that you mention the improvement in this regard with update 3.5. Skritter will indeed remember your actual position inside a section if you tap on back. However, this is only the case if you do not add the respective word to your review list. This seems not to be the ideal solution.

Okay, I understand your flow.

Sounds like the feature you’re really looking for is a way to quick-add vocabulary from textbooks/decks in the app that you find interesting to a personal deck so you can study them (but not the entire deck) individually. The alternative that you’re describing at the moment is adding countless study decks to your library that you’re not really studying from (apart from a few choice words) and might be a large part of why your review sync is taking so long recently.

Skritter wasn’t designed to do the thing you’re doing. So every time you browse a deck like this and study from it, you’re actually saving the entire deck contents onto the app and your account for future study-- just FYI.

If you wanna go this route with the current app, here is a flow that you could try, which might optimize things a bit:

  1. Scan deck(s) for interesting content
  2. Use copy to clipboard (new feature in 3.5.2) on the Info screen to grab the vocab item and past it into a notes app quick
  3. Rinse and repeat without losing your spot in the deck or deck section
  4. Create a random words deck or deck section for a given month and add them all the stuff into it
  5. Learn the items

I don’t think the solution really addresses the issue.

For example I have a weekly tutoring session that is a conversation session. After the class I go back and add all of the new vocabulary words to my tutoring-class Skritter deck, in a new section titled with the date of that tutoring session.

However, I never really plan on going through and learning every single word that I added in to the deck section for that day. I search through and I look for the words that are the most relevant to me currently, and will learn those. However they’re definitely not in any particular order, because they came up organically in class, and I only pick and choose the ones that I really want to learn today.

So, like the OP, I have many decks with a large numbers of sections and large numbers of words, in which I pick and choose the ones that I want to learn. Sometimes that may be 10 out of 50 words other times it may be 40 out of 60 words. But the nature of the list is that my “interested” items are scattered throughout the list.

I definitely would not want to transfer many words (a few dozen every lesson) to a new list every week just in order to learn and keep an “intact” list of things that I’m going to learn 100% just to benefit Skritter’s “housekeeping” expectations.

I’m not saying we can’t improve this, but I’m offering a solution and workflow in the meantime that could improve the flow a bit. Especially if it causing daily frustration. It sounds like there is a lot of deck jumping, and that was a bit concerning to me (for the accounts sake). Our decks were not designed to be cherry-picked from in the way that was being described, and it puts a big burden on on the account.

What you’re describing is a similar issue in terms of getting kicked back to the deck section start after learning a word, but I wouldn’t recommend the same advice I gave for OP. You’ve already found the words you want to study and put them in a deck you own.

In your case, here are a few things you could consider:

  1. Organize the deck section based on priority or interest when making it.
  2. Press learn on the deck section, and just accept that life’s a little chaotic sometimes
  3. Edit the deck and take a minute to drag the times you want to study for the day to the top of the deck section (and then batch study)

Please don’t take these suggestions the wrong way. None of this might sound ideal, but they’re workarounds that you could try using in your Skritter flow. And they’d probably save some amount of time in the long run.


I too have conversation classes every week, but our workflow is way different. My path to new words is Skritter is:

  1. Add all words from Skype chat into Notion card for that week’s class.
  2. Add reading, definition, and 相關詞.
  3. Write some example sentences
  4. Pick the ones actually worth investing in long-term and add to Skritter
  5. Smash the learn button

Learning cards via the Info screen is very much a one-off experience. This is leaps-and-bounds more flexible than what was possible in previous iterations of Skritter, so we’re already quite pleased with where it is, and where it is heading in the future.

We can certainly see if we can return you to the same spot in the deck section when you’re done, but I don’t wanna make any guarantees right now. @josh might be able to comment on the complexity of remembering the location in the deck when returning from the learning experience, but it might not be easy. At the moment, it is the two of you talking about this issue, and I’ve got to balance that with everything else going on in our business.

P.S. I too am a dad with two kids, and a job who’s trying to study Chinese outside my typical work day. So, I have a pretty good understanding of what kind time and energy you have per day to study Chinese, and use Skritter.

I totally get that the current solution is not great for either of your study flows. We do have plans to allow you to select a lot of random items in the deck and jump into a learning session for those items and other things like that, but we’re working on Progress at the moment :slight_smile:

did talk with Josh this morning. Not the most difficult task in the world, but likely not included in 3.5.2 patch. We will get this done in the near(ish) future. Opening an improvement JIRA today!

thanks for the detailed study flows. Certainly helped to put the issue into perspective :slight_smile:

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This doesn’t seem to be working on 3.5.3., or maybe it’s just me (?)

The new rejuvenation popup forces you to the top of the deck to calculate values. Opening a JIRA bug fix now so that once you hide the popup from the deck it’ll remember your position correctly. Thanks for pointing this out!

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This topic is now closed. Found a bug, or wanna keep the conversation going? Head over to: 3.5.3 testing notes (extended edition) Or, open a new post for something you’d like to discuss with the community!