I have just signed up to Skritter and although I think it's a great way to practise Hanzi I can't work out an easy way to add words that I want to study. The textbook I use is A Key to Chinese Speech and Writing. I started going through the HSK list looking for the characters I want to study but this is very time-consuming. Is there no search function or a quicker way of finding the Hanzi I want?

Go to Vocabulary > Lists, then Your Queue, and paste the words you're interested in into the big text box. Then Validate, and Add Words to Queue. Think each word needs to be on its own line.

Yeah, we'll be improving the visibility of the Queue so it's more clear you can go there to add words, it's a bit too out of the way right now. Currently it's the only way you can add words your own specific words you want to study. I'll be working on building a system to allow you to make your own lists and share them in the coming weeks, so you won't be limited to the Queue.

Is it bad form to add random words? Like, the name of the restaurant around the corner? Or is that cool.

Thanks for your quick replies. My next question is is it not possible to input the words in pinyin? If not, how do I input the words?

Install an IME (input method editor) for Chinese. Microsoft has one: go to control panel, regional / language settings, Keyboards and Languages, change keyboard, add Chinese. Then switch to Chinese, type pinyin in a text box, and choose from the list of characters it gives you.

Or use nciku.com - type pinyin and search, it will give suggestions, you can copy and paste.

I think the random words will only work if the restaurant happened to already be in one of the lists, or can you add definitions too?

Thanks for everybody's help.

It looks like you can add definitions too, which is why I was wondering.

You can add the name of the restaurant down the corner, unless it would overshadow a real word that someone might feasibly want to know. If it's just in your queue, no one will see it unless they add the same word.

Except George and I, who check over the user-submitted words for consistency. We will learn where you eat.

Haha. Okay cool. Well, you'll get some good recommendations for Manhattan Chinatown then!

I still don't understand how this works. I had 92 items in my queue list from yesterday. Today I added several more but they did not appear in the queue list. So I added them again. Still not there. I did some more practice, and the new characters came up ahead of the characters I already had waiting, which I haven't practised yet. However I still cannot view the characters I've added today. Can somebody explain please.

The way adding words works is that you choose what you want to study, and as you practice, those words are added over time. So when you add words to the queue, it's just giving the system something to grab from when it's time to learn more words or characters. You won't see those characters that you added to the queue until they're taken from the queue while you practice. And as words are added from the queue, they disappear from the queue, so if you keep practicing without adding anything more to the queue, eventually the queue will empty and you'll stop learning new words until you give the system more to draw from, either by choosing a list or adding more to the queue.

It sounds like the words you tried to add to the queue were already added, and in fact were just taken from the front of the queue. So when you try to add words to the queue that you already have in the queue or you're already studying, nothing will change. But yeah, if something is shown in the queue, then you're not studying it until it's taken out of the queue, and that happens in the order that you added them.

Does that explain how the queue is working the way it's working? If it's not working the way I'm describing then perhaps it needs some more thorough looking at.

In that case how can I view all the words that I have added?

Aha! I found the bug. A change I made the other day inadvertently made it so that adding words to the queue added the words directly to your list of words to study. So everything you were adding wasn't appearing in the queue but just going straight to being practiced, that's why they skipped ahead of the other ones.

Well I just uploaded a fix so once again words added to the queue will appear in the queue.

We're going to have to start following some more stringent rules of testing before uploading things soon I think. It will mean new features aren't uploaded as quickly as possible, but it will make bugs like this crop up on the main site less often. Well we're still in beta for about a week!

To view words you are studying, click 'viewer' under the vocabulary tab. You can sort all the things you're studying in different ways. And eventually you'll be able to download all your data with some sort of exporting system.

Sorry for the bug!

OK, well thanks for all your work. It certainly makes learning hanzi more enjoyable. Do I need to add the words again or are they somewhere in the system?

They're in the system, they just were added earlier than they should have been. So you should be good to go, although with a few more new words to study than usual.