Use this topic to share your thoughts on the new teaching mode feature on Skritter 2.0!
Here are some things we’d really love to know:
Don’t know what I’m talking about? Be sure to check out the blog post about it here!
Fantastic! Great idea. Looks good so far. How does grading work for teaching mode? Does it automatically mark it as wrong, or neutral?
I love the fact that you’ve included leech detection :-). Haven’t come across any leeches yet but I wonder if it’s possible to have a more sophisticated leech detection method, such as a ratio of time spent studying to amount of time got right, maybe weighted on a time basis to ensure the most recent data is prioritised?
One thing I’ve noticed, the tone prompt now looks just the same as the teaching mode writing prompt which was a bit confusing.
Could you clarify what it means when it says teaching mode will be the default behavior for any new items that appear on the beta site? I ask because I’m not able to test this for myself because as of now the Beta is only presenting me with words containing characters that have yet to be implemented into Skritter, so they don’t work. I don’t know if it’s using teaching mode on every character because they are part of a new word, or because it’s the first time they’ve been encountered on the beta site and every ‘new’ character will be presented in teaching mode, whether it’s part of a new word or not.
I’m assuming it’s a bug that the beta is presenting me with words containing non-working characters, but I’m wondering what will be done about this - will the client be fixed so as to not show these words or will the new characters be implemented so they start working? My due count is never accurate and I’m wondering if it’s because of it taking into account these characters it can’t show me on iOS, the same ones the beta is showing me but don’t yet function.
As for Leeches, I’m fine with whatever system you want to implement because something is better than nothing and I’m sure you’ll improve it over time - Catherine’s suggestion seems worth thinking about. That said, the new site doesn’t yet seem to have all the information that the old site has, where if you click a word in your list you see all the information relating to it, including the success rate all the way down to individual characters. I hope that if you do bring all this data over you make it more user-friendly and add more functionality in terms of being able to sort words and characters by % correct/incorrect, how many fails, etc. It seems like a waste to have all this data hidden away in lists where we as users can’t really do much with it, or even view it in a useful way through graphs and such.
It means any item that has never been reviewed before will default to teaching mode. It will get silently marked wrong after teaching mode has been completed and the next time it’s seen you’ll be on your own. It can also be manually graded correct in the event the new character or word is already known. This functionality can be toggled off using the gear settings button from the study page.
I see the issue that is happening with you account getting flooded by items that have never been studied, but also missing some stroke data preventing them from being studied. Working on a fix for this, so that the client will only be giving things that can actually be studied from the api.
Tried on desktop, first impressions are good, really good.
The general idea for the additions is great. I did miss a proper study option This seems to be it and I like it very much.
I like the clean interface. The new tracing method is very interesting, I think it might help memorize better.
Tracing with a mouse on a desktop seems to have become smoother. Am I right? It could also be something to do with Windows 10, I hadn’t used Skritter with Win 10 on the desktop before.
Like Catherine, I found the tone practice screen confusing, missed it every time thinking I was still on a tracing screen.
I’d probably like a little more explanation as to where I am, what am I supposed to do, what do the icons mean? Perhaps pop-up legend when hovering on the icons?
I have to try this Beta longer to start remembering where everything is. I noticed some characters had a detail of radical / radical number but others are lacking this? Or did I get lost? I like learning what’s the radical (this probably dates me)
I was also impressed with the Youdao on line dictionary. Not only it seems thorough and gives lots of examples, it also is blissfully free of the demented animations that infest most Chinese pages. Great find!
I’ll be back with more comments when I’ve tried further.
Thanks for all the work you’re doing guys!
We’re going with simple leech detection for now. It’s possible that we can advance the algorithm in the future, but we’d like to prioritize getting other things onto the new site first. We’ll certainly keep your ideas in mind.
We’re thinking the same thing. It’s on the list of things to address. I’d like to avoid a clunky design that needs to be updated again and again, so it’ll take a bit of thought as to the best way to address it.
Progress stats and information haven’t been released on the new site yet. We’re still working on implementing the new designs and making sure they’re all working. Stay tuned for updates!
It is part of the upgrade to html5 rather than flash. Things should be a lot quicker to respond on the average browser!
We’ll be working on a full guide to the new site that will explain what each button/feature does. It’s on the list of things to get out soon!
Radicals and character details are not built for the new site yet. Development is working on getting those out in the near future.
Looking forward to more feedback. Feel free to open a new topic if it isn’t related to teaching mode so we can keep things organized.
Haven’t tried this but maybe in teaching mode you can animate in the prompt stroke by stroke
Teaching mode shows an animated trace stroke by stroke. As you follow it keeps progressing the trace to the next stroke until the character is fully drawn.
BTW I like today’s update of the finished character appearing faded in the background after writing - useful to remind me of the “correct” form but still be able to see my squigs 
I like the selection of dictionaries under “look up” in the pop-up window from “i”. Great examples and explanations.
One little trick I just discovered is: in Chrome, when you highlight a sentence and right-click, the context menu gives a link to Google Translate. Go there and on the left hand side, under the Chinese box there’s a button for TTS, So you can get the example sentences read. I like this.
(I think it might need installing a Google Translate extension in Chrome)
I desperately would like the following features:
A centralised location with the characters I’ve learned, and another with the ones I’m currently working on. At the moment I have no idea which characters the system thinks I’ve learned.
The ability to manually specify how many times in a row I need to get a character right, and how much time is allowed for each character, before I determine that it is learned.
The ability to specify how often learned characters get retested.
Learning radicals mode. Separate from characters, this focuses on teaching the radicals.
A setting whereby I can be taught a character in stages. So firstly I am prompted for the first radical, then I write that, then the second, etc. Rather than having to write the entire character out at once.
More than one user setting on one device. I want to use this simultaneously with my son, but we can’t do that at the moment. It would be great to be able to do this and compare progress.
Achievements!
So, what happened to leech detection? It doesn’t seem to have appeared anywhere, including IOS app, and I don’t use the HTML5 website because of its errors in tracking. I’m contemplating moving to Anki completely later this year - I quit studying handwriting a while ago, because of its rather low usefulness and because I get sick of, surprise, leeches.
@SkritterJake your link in the original post is dead.
