The 3rd stroke in the Chinese character 汉 requires me to swipe upwards. This often accidentally triggers a gesture and clears the drawing board. Is there any way to prevent that?
I am using the Android Skritter app.
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Thanks for the report! @SkritterMichael @Jeremy any way we can tune this up a bit to not trigger as often?
I’ll look into tweaking the range of recognition. In the meantime, try writing the upward dot so it’s more of a diagonal stroke to the right rather than an upward stroke.
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@SkritterMichael , your improvements seem to work, the upward stroke gesture has not been giving me much trouble any more.
However recently I more and more I find that that the swipe-right gesture triggers accidentally, which will skip to the next card. Accidentally swiping to the right after a character has been drawn generally happens in two circumstances:
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I misremember the character and instead of a 冂 component (as in 同) I draw 囗. This actually happens regularly (I guess this does not speak for a good learning progress on my part, haha). So after the first 2 strokes, the app will think the character is done, and when I draw the final stroke, it will skip to the next card.
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In the app, you may choose to draw the 口 kǒu component as 3 or 2 strokes. I usually draw it in 3 strokes, but sometimes when it comes out scrawly, the app thinks I am done after 2 strokes, and yet again the last stroke will skip to the next card.
I rarely use gestures at all, so I think the best solution for me would be an option so that I can disable all (or some of the) gestures in the app. Especially the next-card gesture is not used by me because I always use the buttons (“forgot”/“hard”/“got it”). I hope you can consider implementing this.
Hi, what appears to be happening is that you unintentionally complete some characters with a shortcut stroke and then your final stroke get interpreted as a tap on the canvas, which advances the prompt. I’ll bring it up to the team and see what we can do to make strokes on the canvas after the character completed feel more intuitive and prevent these unexpected prompt advances.
While we have plans in the future to make some of the strokes less lenient to prevent accidental recognition, in the meantime, my advice would be to either:
- Learn to write a bit more precisely for certain strokes so the shortcut isn’t triggered. For example, with the 2nd stroke of 口, make sure the downward part doesn’t angle to the left, make sure the angle is close to 90 degrees (or even a bit wider).
- Embrace the shortcut strokes. All the shortcuts we allow are based on giving an experience closer to how speakers actually write. Obviously we can’t accept everything and every variation, but we try to capture some of the common patterns so that Skritter reflects reality a bit more. As a personal anecdote, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a native speaker write 口 as 3 separate strokes outside of a classroom, despite it being the “correct” way.
Follow-up from fellow daily Skritter user and 行书/草书 note taker. I never write it 3 strokes unless I’m using Skritter or deliberately writing in 楷体. I actually usually write it in one stroke in rawest or with a pen, but Skritter would erase that when I go up to complete the second/third part of the character when snapping strokes are one.
@Chris We can certainly figure out how to make the canvas gestures more customizable in the future, but my personal advice would be to make the next-card tap gesture your best friend on things you get correct if you’re planning on using Skritter a lot. Works great for definition and reading cards too!
Having to move your hand down to the bottom of the screen and find the “got it” button is way too slow in the long run. I haven’t timeboxed myself, but watching others Skritter over the years I’d say that I’m orders of magnitude faster than most in my sessions by skipping that step in my flow and only using the grading buttons when I’m scoring things “forgot, hard, easy.”
For reference, I have over 17 days of total recorded study time on Skritter since my last account nuke… so every little second shaved helps!
Thank you for your replies.
I can try and use the gestures more and see if things get easier. I don’t think moving the finger has been much of a time factor for me. I use a metal-tip pen, and the buttons are big enough that they can be hit quite fast. I am usually quite slow writing the characters because after some 2 years they are still not easy to recall from memory, so hitting the button has not really been the what slows me down 
By the way, it occurred to me there is one gesture that I do use once in a while, which is the one that gives a hint for the next stroke.
I’ll have a try using the shortcut version for 口. What is the best way to learn the shortcut strokes? Googling I have found a blog post about the 2-stroke 口. Are there other components that should be written as shortcuts? Basically I have learned all characters using “teach me” in Skritter, following the suggested strokes.
Perhaps a video/guide of shortcut stokes is in order. They’re mostly fun optimization hacks we’ve built into some characters/components to help make writing a little smoother and more similar to native-like handwriting. Your current path is 100% correct for how to learn stroke order and handwriting. Gotta master the rules before you can start breaking them!
Keep at it, it’ll get easier and easier! I struggled to recall lots of characters for many years. The breakthrough was understanding exactly how character structure and forms work (see the Chinese Character Course in-app if you haven’t already) and applying that knowledge to loads of other characters over time. 慢慢來！
TBH, the tap-advance gesture is probably most helpful for reading and definition cards where you can tap anywhere below the divider line.
