Skritter 101, the char. 起 is not introduced before the word 對不起

I am just starting out with Skritter, working through Skritter 101, and was surprised to find that 起 was not introduced as a stand alone character before being introduced as part of 對不起. The component parts of 起 were introduced. Not a big deal for me, I added 起 in my own small list so it is covered. Just something that popped up as odd to me. I have read through the other forum comment about skritter 101 asking why gen3 was included, so I do realize there is a different take on how we want to learn things.

Also my first forum comment. :slight_smile:

Hi!

I haven’t designed the list, so bear that in mind. Perhaps @SkritterJake can explain if the things you mentioned are intentional or not. In any case, if I had designed the list, I wouldn’t necessarily introduce all parts of all words before the words and all character components before the components. I can see that that is mostly the case with the list, but I usually do it the other way around if the whole word is more common/useful than the single character, which is certainly the case in your example. Regarding 艮, which is the character I think you refer to, I’m pretty sure it’s included because it’s a fairly common phonetic component, such as in 很、跟、根 etc.

Also, welcome to the forum! :slight_smile:

I wonder if it’s because 起 has so many meanings that it might be confusing to introduce it so early. When I started learning Chinese I learnt “duibuqi” for “sorry” long before I knew the various and complex uses for 起 (or for that matter 对!).

Incidentally, I’ve found this is one of the (few!) drawbacks of Skritter/flashcards in general. I find it hard to make characters that often come as part of words stick in my mind, such as 以 or 然 , since I added them (because they were in basic words) before I understood all their uses as an individual character. It gets demoralising to keep seeing them pop up in my reviews and STILL not be able to pin down the definition!

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Thanks both of you for the replies. SkritterOlle, it is good to know what to expect in the different lists, so thanks for your perspective. And thanks Catherine too. Your point about pinning down the meaning of some of these characters added because they are parts of words is important to me. I have to take things apart and see how they are made, it is my nature and I can’t get by that.

I am OK with just seeing the basic meaning of a word and not learning all the different nuances, when I just wanted to know what it was. I am not OK with writing a character that is part of a word when I don’t have a basic idea of what the character is. To me that is like writing a word in English when you don’t know all the letters. So I will try and keep things in perspective on these added words until I really need to know their meaning.