Learning characters could be made more convenient if we were able to review only a specific form of a character. Here are a few motives:
- When we start learning the language, we should be able to focus on the most common meaning and pronunciation. Not adding a clutter of less common ones.
- Grading and Learning is biased in the sense that we can provide an incorrect pinyin (not the one corresponding to the meaning we have in mind)
The flashcards from other apps (Pleco for instance) allow users to have flashcards for a specific variant of a character.
I don’t know how the Skritter database is built. Do you think it would be possible to achieve?
Unfortunately with the way Skritter tracks information in Chinese, characters like 得 cannot be split out into separate words. Japanese does split out different readings/definitions into separately study-able words. But regardless, you can edit word definitions to suit your study needs. If you don’t need a rare definition, you can remove it. And if you find you want to add it later on, you can edit it again.
As far as grading, it is intentionally ultimately up to the learner to determine whether they knew a piece of information or did something correctly or incorrectly. For instance, there’s a difference between getting a writing prompt auto-graded as incorrect because the stroke recognition failed to correctly interpret what a user was writing for something they did know vs. a user incorrectly writing the wrong stroke. Perhaps user really didn’t remember a component of a character, but it’s inconsequential because they’d never mistake the character in context while reading, so it’s good enough for them. Or maybe a user only remembered one reading or definition of a word with multiple definitions. Did they answer the prompt correctly? The answer is: it depends. What are the user’s goals for the session? What do they want to learn or improve? My advice would be to grade in a way that makes your time spent the most useful toward your studies and goals. Sometimes that means letting mistakes slide or marking incorrect prompts as correct, sometimes it means marking correct prompts as incorrect to get extra practice and strengthen a memory.