I use Skritter mainly to remember how to write things by hand. It’s not that I know all words, obviously, but I find it pretty easy to learn words in context if I already know the characters (which is almost always the case).
Like I said, though, I don’t have only single characters. If I come across a character I don’t know any words for, I either ban it (if it’s beyond the 4,500 most common characters) or add a word if there is a reasonably common word that uses that character. I also add words when I forget how to write the single character.
I would probably benefit from using SRS for words, too, but I’d rather spend that time listening and reading, and like I said, I think handwriting is the main problem, so using Skritter for that is perfect!
What I still like to see in Skritter is the ability to save the selected decks and number of cards I want to study in review mode. It’s a bit annoying that the settings are reset every time I finish a review session. Maybe you can add a box which says “save/remember this setting for future reviews”
Good idea. I have been working on the same deck daily for a long time now, and it is a bit clunky to have to scroll down through my many decks to find it.
@SkritterJake I have a question concerning the latest public build on iOS. Why does Skritter take several seconds to load after finishing a review session? That’s a bit annoying if you want to start reviewing directly again as you have to wait for Skritter to finish syncing. The reason I mention this is that in previous builds Skritter was loading pretty instant after finishing a review session, meaning I didn’t have to wait these extra seconds.
Maybe you can look into this.
This also happens when you hit on “due cards”, then directly go back to the main page and hit on “due cards” again. Then Skritter is loading for 2 seconds even though a review session was not even started. Again, why I’m nitpicking about this is because it was pretty instant in earlier builds.
We’re deliberately slowing things down to make sure that any sync (when not in offline mode) is finished and data has been correctly saved. After doing some deep digging into some error logs we found out that you could actually get ahead of the sync in some cases (ex. marking a lot of cards and learned and then jumping into a review session. Or, clearing a huge queue of items and then reviewing the incorrect cards).
So, while it was instant before, it could lead to some potential problems. We’ll continue to look into ways to optimize this process a bit in the future, but going in and out of review sessions will likely never be instant again.
Hi, after coming back to Skritter after a short break the latest beta looks much more consistent. Nice work. Three points:
when turning Auto advance on one always has to wait a few seconds until the next card automagically is displayed. The obligatory wait is even there when clicking one of the grading buttons on the button. In my understanding this feature should not apply when pressing grading buttons, as there is already an “instant advance”. The effect is in this case more of a slow down.
the Hanzi character fonts are still quite small and the grading buttons tiny on my IPhone 7. Lots of white space that could be used. Any chance to tune that up a bit?
still missing a bit more FX in the app. Hope we can get some themes later that resemble the legacy app.
Do you have the fastest auto-advance speed selected? 0.5 seconds should speed it up. Likewise, you can boost the animation speed to make it feel faster.
Are you using 4 button grading, or the default 2? The app is designed to work on a multitude of devices, so might not be fully optimized for all, but on the iPhone 7, it should be reasonable. Could you share a screenshot?
This past month we’ve been working on behind the scenes billing things, but are gearing up to begin work on more user-facing features and quality of life improvements. We still very much want to get more themes into the app, once more pressing features are implimented.
thanks for the tip regarding the auto advance speed setting. The speed setting pops up only after setting auto advance to on and only in the main menu, so I overlooked it. Was using the quick setting on the review screen.
here’s the screenshot: in my opinion loads of space that can be used for making the character itself bigger as well as the grading buttons etc.
Recently I’ve been using the beta app more than legacy and I’ve become fond of how the Learn a new character works (definition, pinyin, tone, writing in a package, after which it is added to the Review queue).
However
While it is sometimes definitely a must have Te be able to intentionally work through a new deck section to add Multiple new characters to one’s personal review list, it often feels like a chore to me, especially in periods when I’m too busy to study and would like to focus on reviewing.
Wouldn’t it be possible to add an option (!) to enable Learning new characters inside Review mode? New characters/words would appear from time to time, and for each new character/word it could have that complete Learning instance (definition, pinyin, tone, writing for that word) embedded just as in Learn mode. After clickIng “Mark Learned”, the character is added and the review goes on.
This would spice up the review queue with events (“new character!”) and would Give the chance to gradually add new characters to the queue.
OK cool. Would also be nice to be able to customize the learning instance. Sometimes I would like to be able to chip in a second prompt of writing blindly directly after the first one to fortify learning (I’m learning mostly by writing multiple times) or skip the definition prompt if there is a pinyin prompt anyway showing the definition etc.
Dear Skritter Team, I just want to kindly ask you to share some insights about the development of the upcoming betas. It’s been quite a while since we heard something more specific from you guys. I would appreciate some kind of update what (and roughly when) to expect from new promising features to enhance the user experience.
Maybe you can find the time to give us some information
We’re working through some back-end projects at the moment that need to get finished up before we can get back to app development.
Task 1-- Migration to Stripe billing API for the website. This is a massive overhaul of our billing system, and requires a lot of testing the checks to deploy. The updates go live on July 31st for our sign up page. After that, we’ll be manually moving all existing users into the new system and wrapping up the project.
Task 2-- Skritter Classroom client updates Schools are on break, and we’re taking the opportunity to improve the Classroom system for all of our teachers. We’ve got two tasks left to finish up, and then the changes go live.
Mobile next steps-- 3.4.9
Patch update to fix some bugs and improvements that have been reported in previous builds. We’ll be kicking this off in early August.
Beyond 3.4.9
Progress screen on the mobile app, and some other awesome stuff that I’m not quite ready to discuss just yet. Once this billing overhaul is done you can expect us to get back to a more typical release cycle of patch updates and beta builds as we work toward some larger features and improvements.
Quick feedback and request: Please pre-load mnemonics. Studying on the commute most of the time upon swiping right, mnemonics take ages to load or never do. This is really annoying. In the legacy app, all the info screen information was available instantly. Can this be reproduced in the new app?
This also sometimes happens with the information in the info screen.
I was away for a while with very poor cell data connection. I found Skritter beta just would not open beyond the black screen, completely stalled.
To get it to work I had to turn my phone onto airplane mode.
However, a bright note: I drove to a spot that had good cell data signals every once in a while to input new words into my list. Was delighted to discover that, unlike legacy Skritter, once I had added the words to the list with a cell data connection, I was both able to review them and edit definitions on airplane mode.
In legacy Skritter, one had to add all the words into the review cue first in order to be able to study them offline. This beta is a big improvement for subway study and other situations with no WiFi or cell data.
In my opinion the idea that these words have similar meanings is the biggest misconception. It’s al because of translating into English. I f you want to know te meaning of a word you should look it up in a Chinese dictionary, the same as you do in your own language when you want to know the real meaning of a word.
I think Skritter should also support the use of some Chinese dictionary’s and not only English ones.
