I try to be as diligent and honest with myself as I can be when writing characters using Skritter. I turn raw squigs on and do my best to avoid that alluring first tap to give me the first stroke, which somehow is always the hardest to remember.
But I fail to do this reasonably often, and tap away, and give myself a yellow where I really should be giving myself a red because I didn’t wholly remember the character.
Similarly, when I’m writing a character an I’m slightly off in position or stroke direction, Skritter helps me by showing me what should have come next.
I wonder if there’s any possibility of a future ‘silent’ mode where Skritter lets you have a go at writing the whole character before it tells you if you were right or wrong. Certainly, this will be painful at first (like when first moving to raw squigs) but I suspect it will ultimately result in far better retention in the long term.
I know there’s lots of dev stuff happening in the background, so I thought I’d ask if something like this was being considered? If not, what are the chances it could be?
@otakumike It’s certainly an interesting idea. We don’t have much development time to put into something like this right now, but we can certainly start by turning tap-to-reveal off when raw squigs is enabled. That way the only way you can see what’s next is by hitting the eye or teaching wand, and those automatically mark the character as wrong.
We’ll to include that in the next Android update and you can give it a shot!
I think writing on a piece of actual paper and manually grading the prompts to benefit from the SRS would also accomplish the goal, if you haven’t tried!
@SkritterJake - I think that’s a good middle ground. I don’t have Android, just iOS, so I can’t check it out but it’s nice to know it’ll some day make it’s way into iOS.
@Jeremy - not sure I understand. If I just used real paper, why would I have Skritter? The whole reason I use and pay for Skritter is because it’s fun and takes care of managing character orders and SRS for me. Paper sucks!
Ah sorry, I mean using Skritter to have it feed you words as normal using the SRS, and in the meantime you might be able to accomplish the goal you’re looking for on a piece of paper, since the silent mode you thought of couldn’t give stroke order hints or any visual clues, since it would give away the fact it isn’t the character you were going to write if it did.
If I’m not mistaken the only difference between the silent mode and a piece of actual paper would be drawing raw (ugly :-P) squigs on a screen versus actual pretty ink on paper, it might be a good idea too if in the silent mode you would still have to let the system know when you were done writing the character for a complete unassisted test, opposed to snapping to the completed character once it’s strokes are done. It may not be a great workaround since your eyes would have to hop from paper back to a screen, but I thought I would suggest it anyway!
I feel kind of silly now. You’re right - the best way to get what I want is to practice writing on paper, leveraging Skritter where I can to be a bit more efficient.
Thanks for the feedback. Consider my feature request dropped
@josh I think it might better to make it an option, not just the default if raw squigs are used. So you can have raw squigs (like now), or raw squigs without tap-for-hint.
Hi there
I would say that for me the tap to hint isn’t the “biggest” problem, as if I tap, I did so voluntary and will then always mark the word as incorrect.
What I find more troublesome is that once skritter sees the character as complete it will reveal it. But maybe I had secretly planned to add some more strokes. A good example is the 心 in 想 vs 相. I find it much more difficult to be honest with myself in these circumstances.
It would be great if one would need to tell skritter when one considers the character complete before it is being revealed.
@susannekaiser This one has been brought up before on the old forum, and I don’t think it reached a consensus, I think mainly because some people thought the extra time taken for that step would slow down the very smooth experience. I agree though, it’s very hard to be honest with myself in such cases, but I’m not sure what the solution is.
Hi! I think the original poster dropped the silent mode request, but I’d like to request this feature myself. If I write a character on paper, I have to then spend time comparing it to the solution, which is not only unnecessarily time consuming but also error prone. Skritter’s silent mode would accept my finished character, do the comparison for me, and then let me know how I did. Think of it as the boss level for learning a given character. I think it’d be really useful and fun!
@josh actually hacked together a game mode similar to this a month or so ago when he needed a break from general programing work. It’s not unlikely that we’ll have some kind of “boss level” for learning characters in the future. Currently, however, we’re working as fast as we can on bringing major updates to Skritter, and it’s unlikely that we’ll make any progress on something like this until this massive project is completed.
I really like the idea of a ‘boss level’. I’m not using raw squigs yet (because I’m prioritizing seeing correct rather than ugly lines), but the ideas discussed in this thread would get rid of several issues I have:
a) Snapping-to gives away whether there’s another element sometimes: [quote=“susannekaiser, post:10, topic:403”]
A good example is the 心 in 想 vs 相.
[/quote]
b) It gives away whether or not there’s a dot at the end - characters ending with 犬 are particularly spoilered by this.
c) It’d be nice to be able to turn off tapping-to-show entirely. I never do it intentionally, and often do it accidentally.
