Ok, after a few hours of playing around with the beta here’s some of my feedback (using a Google Pixel phone and 3.1.4 (300168):
Positives
I LOVE LOVE LOVE that you can just review specific card types, i.e. just definition, or definition and reading etc. I’ve long thought that there are different situations in my life (riding the MRT, watching a baseball game, etc) which are better suited to different card types. I think this will really help me get through the major backlog and keep up better (at one point last week I was at 4600 reviews).
I really like that you can choose either specific decks and specific sections of decks. This means that someone in a Chinese class can focus on the words they’re learning in class now. I remember trying desperately to catch up on reviews and then frantically add new words so that I could maybe do some preview work of vocab before my class started a new chapter. I think in 6 months it happened once? This is a great feature, along with the test mode.
Having which deck the word came from is so great (and I absolutely second going more detailed there and adding the section). My question is, what if it’s in multiple decks? I have a lot of duplicate vocab from premade lists, or lists I made myself with words I forgot about. On that note, what actually happens when a word you’ve already “learned” shows up as a word on a new deck?
I also really appreciate the reviews statistics in the info section for each word. If writing says 14/35 (40%), what exactly does that mean? That I’ve written that word correctly 14 times but to “learn” it, I need to write it correctly 35 times? When I get 35 times, will it never show up in reviews again? Really, in general more info on this would be amazing, I’m super interested!
Problems
Right now the biggest disappointment for me is the lack of the setting to turn off pinyin. For me, this is an absolute must. When it would show up after I wrote the words or the tone, it was there as a reinforcement of what I was pretty sure the sound was, but as of now, with the pinyin just showing up, not only is it not helping me to learn the character or it’s definition, it’s just making it more likely for me to remember the pinyin instead of the character.
Kinda along the same lines as #5 but why is there no definition for the tone cards? It’s just pinyin. Have you found it’s easier to learn the tones with just the character and no definition? In that case, I would say pinyin is extra distracting here (please bring back the pinyin toggle ).
About the yellow so-so selection. I used to use it when, for example, on writing cards, if I couldn’t remember the pronunciation and would reveal the pinyin (or in the rare occasions I could write the character but couldn’t remember the pinyin). This was my, “I remembered half of it” compromise. I do agree that you (as you said somewhere in this post) you either know a character or word or you don’t. Maybe in the future if (when ) you bring back the hidden pinyin, if it seems right, you could have this as an automatic yellow if you reveal the pinyin but still get the character right?
If I just tap to advance on a definition card, instead of on “got it” or “forgot”, is that automatically one or the other?
The other major problem is the lack of sound. It really really helps me to hear how to say the words, even just as reinforcement. I suspect this may actually be a bug because even when I press on the microphone symbol nothing happens.
As others have said before, the writing field is significantly smaller.
I see no way to edit decks or sections of decks in the app. One of the running lists I had going on the previous app was a “Songs I Like” where I would just add new sections for every new song I decided I wanted to sing at KTV, and then it would add that list back in as an active list. Other than going to the website, is there a way to do this now?
Suggestions
I like the featured decks! I’ve been looking for lists of random vocab like foods and animals and clothing items and things. Maybe at some point if you get around to it, have a “Skritter Made” section under browse would be cool (think like the Netflix Original section), so if people want to beef up on their (enter random topic here) vocab, they could go there first to see if anything exists.
This is less to do with this app but Skritter in general. I would love, and I’m sure there’s others here too, for a Taiwan Chinese setting. Taiwan Chinese isn’t that different from China Chinese, and once you turn on the traditional, it’s really only a select few characters that have differences, but it is different enough for me to wish there was a Taiwan Chinese mode, especially when Taiwanese people correct me on my tones or writing of something I know I KNOW, but what I know is actually the China pronunciation. One of the most famous is 垃圾, in China read as la1ji1, but in Taiwan as le4se4. There’s of course more, and probably hundreds of tone differences. I know this is a lot to ask, and I understand why you might not think it’s worth it, especially because I’m sure you have droves more users who plan on only ever going to China or have no interest in learning the Taiwanese version of Chinese. But as one user who loves your product and uses it for hours everyday and tells every other Chinese learner they meet that it’s the best way to learn, it would be a really customer focused addition to this app that has changed the way so many of us learn this incredible language.
It will display as the first list you ever added it from.
It’s marked as LEARNED, so it should show a green tick in any deck that has it, and the progress of that list will be larger. It won’t re-auto add that word. This is cool because you can go into a new deck and see % of known words based on things you already know.
We’re still looking to improve the statistics pages going forward.
Thank you for your kind words. It means a lot to the team.
the review stopped 小 and it wouldnt let me proceed. also the tones shifted to left. so at the 么 when i put “no tone” the app gave me error that it was expecting third tone. it lookslike the problem is on both ios and android.
For example 7/29 (24%) means that you have reviewed the writing of the character/word 29 times. 7 of those times you got it correct which gives you a retention rate of 24%. While at reading you got it correct 3 out of 3 times, i.e. 100%.
In the ”old” Skritter you can set a target retention rate between 87-97%. When you hit the chosen target/level/percentage of correct answers then the character/word could be considered learned. (Not sure if this is the number used by Skritter to mark something as learned).
3.1.5 (300171) beta update has been released on Android and iOS. We have deployed several fixes aimed at improving sync stability. This update also includes:
Increased canvas writing size
Improvements to loading speed for section browsing, Learn mode, Test mode, and My Words
A new Reduce- Reuse - Recycle video lesson in Featured Decks
Subscription buttons and sign up options on certain decks and screens (beta)
General bug fixes and improvements
@SkritterMichael or @josh might have more details to add, but these are the highlights. Keep sending bug reports and feedback to team@skritter.com in the app or in an email.
I deinstalled the beta and loaded it again after the update. However, after the update there is an annoying delay after i finish reviewing a word and want to skip to the next word. Can you reproduce that? This does not happen after each word, but it happens pretty occasionally. Using an iPhone X
Also I find the beta still needs way too long to load things and syncing
@Farham could you email us a screencapture of this issue to team@skritter.com when you’ve got a moment? I’m unable to reproduce on my device, but I wanna see what the heck is happening. Thanks in advance!
We’ve got lots of bugs to fix at the moment, but we’ll continue to improve loading speeds as soon as we can.
Weird, could not reproduce it today. Maybe it was just a specific issue yesterday. Anyway, good to see it is gone. In case I see that bug again, I will get in touch
I noticed today that the tone test only shows the character that you are currently being tested on and not the other characters in the word, of the pinyin or the definition. This is a problem when you have a word where the first character is 不，or 一， or something else that the tone changes based on the following character. Is there a setting I have wrong that can fix this?
No setting to fix. However, 3.1.5 (300175) was just released and tone prompts now include definitions to make them more solvable.
One of my afternoon agenda items is to open an issue to further improve the tone cards after that. Targeted fixes for round 2 include adding the audio button to unanswered cards (now it is hidden until card is answered) as well as displaying the item characters, which are super helpful for tone sandhi rules as you mentioned, and some cleaning up of how the audio is being handled.
Displaying definitions along with tone prompts has been a gripe of mine since forever in non-beta. Any chance that the beta will offer a way to study tones without definition hints? (while not leaving the user without any info on writing prompts)
I’m using the beta with quite some satisfaction on iPhone and iPad.
One issue I run into is that when practicing with a Pencil on iPad, the gestures to reveal a single stroke or the whole character can’t be activated without using a finger.
Is there a way to create separate gestures used when practicing with a Pencil (for example double-tap?).
As a separate request, it would be very elegant if the strokes could be more natural based on the force and angle of holding the Pencil. But that’s just something for on the really nice to have list…
Does anyone know how to turn off the audio? I went from having no audio to having too much!
The app reads every single character after doing the tone or writing it. And then, it reads the whole word. Sometimes, it reads the word first and then the characters and THEN the whole word again. It also overlaps the audio with the next word’s audio. I’m assuming this is a bug, so I’m just going to go back to no audio for the time being or my brain is going to melt.
Is it possible to highlight the words “definition” or “pinyin”with 2 different colors in the questions? If you review lots of words in a row, at a certain point I simply oversee whether a definition or pinyin is asked as every word has the same color. By highlighting it with either red/blue/green color, the 2 different questions get more distinct. Maybe you get what I mean. For example, if you see the red color, you automatically know it’s about the definition and blue color is for pinyin.
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) you bring back the hidden pinyin, if it seems right, you could have this as an automatic yellow if you reveal the pinyin but still get the character right?
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