Description: When I’m reviewing words, I want to be able to view one element at a time so that I can better target areas I’m weak at.
Currently, cards will provide several elements in the prompt (eg pinyin and English, or a character and English) and then asks for an other element.
The problem with the current method is that I’m much more familiar with some elements of words than others. When I see too many of them my eye automatically jumps to the one that I know best. I want to force my eye to use prompts I don’t know as well.
Ideally I’d like cards with front(back):
pinyin+voice (character)
pinyin+voice (English)
character (pinyin+voice)
character (English)
English (character)
English (pinyin + voice)
character + toneless pinyin (tone)*
I realize that this will generate a lot more cards but some of them are much easier than others and will drop out of the review rotation quickly.
*I particularly love that you separated this out already. It forces me to think about tones more and that’s helped a lot.
This is a great observation and something we are aware of and already working on. There are currently only some settings that can help you here, such as “Hide Pinyin” and “Hide definition”. The former hides Pinyin in writing prompts and the latter hides the definition so you can focus on writing characters based only on the pronunciation or to see if you can read characters aloud without the extra support of knowing the definition.
These features are meant to address the type of concern you bring up here, but they don’t go all the way. As mentioned, we are working on this, both in terms of being clearer about what we are testing for each prompt and how you as a user can customise this.
So, thank you for bringing this up! Try the “Hide Pinyin” and “Hide definition” settings and see if that at least deals with part of the issue. The rest we’ll keep working on to get it out to all users!
I like the ‘hide’ feature and I look forward to seeing the full implementation.
One bit of feedback is that it would be cool if there were more obvious visual identifiers on what is being asked for.
I notice that I often say a word when I’m supposed to be drawing a tone. When that happens I go back and manually correct my score. Not a big problem but it would make it a bit smoother.
Recently I’ve been trying Duolingo to review and mixing the prompts is something it does fairly well, at least in terms of providing some variety. I do not know if it actually tracks and modifies its behavior beyond a single study session. It seems to just test you on whatever you missed during a single session. You can’t do too much to customize it. Also, in terms of meaning or context there does not seem to be any connection between one sentence and the next, so I think Skritter has the clear advantage of letting you choose or create a deck where all the words or sentences have some clear relationship to each other. I actually quit using Skritter to study tones a long time ago because it was slowing me down, but since my tones have remained pretty bad this thread inspires me to try again.