There are times when I want to turn the stroke order off completely. I will not get into why in this post, but as its an option for this, I guess I'm not alone.

The issue that I have is that Skritter provides me hints even when I turn the stroke order off. They flash as blue, which I find distracting.

I would like to request that in this mode, no hints be given (or at least have the option to turn off the hints). I believe that the program should allow the character to be written, and then in the end, make the determination if the character was drawn correctly.

The recognition engine currently does not work well enough to recover from some recognition mistake in the middle of a character, so without improving that aspect of it, trying to do delayed recognition at the end of a character, especially a long one, might only work a frustratingly low proportion of the time.

I think the use case for most people turning stroke order strictness down is different from yours. Could you explain more about what you're trying to do with Skritter here?

Sure.

Basically, I want to put the program into "just squigs" mode and write the character. at the end it will either turn green or it won't. But I want to write the character in it's entirety with no intervention, and then be told if it is right or not until the end.

If there is an "along the way" tracking mechanism that is required with the current algorithms, thats fine. But in that case, I was hoping the blue hints would be suppressed.

I see what you want it to do, but why do you want it to do this?

There are a few reasons.

After using Skritter for a while, I have found I have really learned the stroke order, etc. So now I find there are few characters where I need assistance on stroke order, once I look at the character.

And there are also those characters where I want to practice a bit more. In those cases I might want to write part of the character that I am having problems a few times. The problem area might not be in the right side of the character, but I do not want to write the whole thing again. In these situations, Skritter would be introducing hints.

This is not to take away from Skritter's overall approach in anyway. I would simply look at this as another knob to turn in how much help along the way Skritter provides - similar to just using squigs, but even a bit more freeform.

And in the end, the character has to be ultimately "acceptable" by the software. So I would basically blindly write the character. And Skritter deems the character unacceptable, the program would be well positioned to show me why via overlaid display.

You would probably do a better job of grading yourself based on comparing the fully written character to the reference than Skritter's recognition would be able to do when operating on the whole character at a time. So it seems like what you need is a mode that just doesn't perform recognition. A not-quite-as-convenient version of this is to draw the character in your head, with your eyes closed, or on paper, then compare it to the Skritter answer. I'm not suggesting that this is as good, but have you tried any of these methods, and are they useful?

You could also try the radicals word list, which I'm finding really useful for some of the 'trickier' characters. Gives me chance to write them by themselves, and helps to reinforce them to me.

@nick -
Writing the characters in my head is what I do when I am in an elevator. It is useful (but really not a substitute for writing).

I was thinking about it today - that yes, maybe what I am talking about is just having a mode where things are totally ungraded, and then you would simply self-grade. This would certainly work. Basically you would have your character and then you could either superimpose the character on your written character either fully opaque or by having some user-settable level of transparency where you could flip between your written and Skritter's character representation. There are other ways to do this as well, like side be side, but I figure that would add complexity.

@CC -
I will look at the radicals word list. But I am not quite clear. That word list you say you can write the characters by themselves? and Skritter does not interact and grade you as you write the strokes?

Sorry, no, I maybe haven't been clear, and it's a partial solution, possibly not the one you want. The Radicals word list gives you 'bits' of characters that are words in themselves. I think you were saying that you wanted to work through something which may be on the right hand side of the character, without also needing to do the left hand side (for example) and it could be that that part of the characters is on the radicals word list, so you could do that.

It will still give you stroke order, and interact. I've just found it helpful for some of the tricker 'bits' of characters, which I can then use more easily in more complicated characters.

Hope that helps!

Anything that aids in drilling down the components would be useful. I have reviewed radicals before, but not with Skritter, so I'll give it a look. Still would like the "total-free-form / no-check" mode though! Many thanks.

Some additional thoughts.

I believe that there is value in being able to write a word, where you are writing the characters together - in sequence.

Currently, writing 不客气 requires movement through 3 different screens. , if I want to practice and write the characters in sequence again, I need to go back through each screen and individually delete the character that was drawn, and then start again.

Working in the current single-character-per-screen mode, I wanted to make the following suggestion:

Concept 1a - Given the current interface, there should be a way to fully wipe out the word being studied so that you can just start from the beginning and write the characters in full and sequentially, even if previously you got some of the characters in a word right and some wrong, e.g., 不客气 － 不 written wrong; 客 written correctly; 气 written wrong; swipe up on any character screen and it will will delete the character (as it does now). Swipe up twice in a row will delete the entire word and set you back to the beginning where all characters in a word have to be written again.

Concept 1b - have a mode that a single upstroke clears writing for all characters and puts you back at the beginning, the first character of the word.

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The other thing I wanted to mention, relating to "no hints", I wanted to suggest a freeform mode where you would self check the characters you write against the full word. In addition to some of the reasons for which I originally suggested this mode, this mode would provide support for:

1) cursive Hanzi
2) multiple characters written on the same screen (e.g., 不客气). The characters would easily fit on the iPad and even on smaller iOS screens and support the concept of writing all the characters sequence and together.

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