Hi,

Current system of reading has two irritating features and they can be easily fixed (I suppose):

1. If you press enter key, while haven't written anything (which sometimes happen by accident) it's treated as if you got it right.
But if you would know you would simply type the answer.

I think system should ignore such action - that is you still have to type.

2. Also if you press SHOW then it treats it as a good answer. Shouldn't it be otherwise?
Then it would be logical, that is how SHOW button works in all the others exercises. And it's logical that is what you press if you don't know the pronunciation yet.

I know these things are pet peeves and I can use CORRECT button, but I've always perceived it as a tool to correct grading system, not me.

@noqa it used to work like that, which I also thought was reasonable, but it was recently changed to the current behavior. I think this was because people wanted it to work more like definition practice.

James

In definition it results from limitation - you can't check someone's definition, not in any way that have sense. But in reading it's the same situation like in writing or tone.

If others wanted it that way - OK, let it be. I don't get these guys :<

I think that for point 1. it should stay as it is, so you can just skip past if you know the answer.
[I find it speeds things up because when practising on a library pc at Uni (without my tablet) I only review tones, definitions and readings and go very fast by keyboard only - for that I'm really thankful that there are handy keyboard shortcuts :)]

But for point 2. I agree, pressing SHOW should definitely mark it wrong!

Consistency with the definition practice has proven important for others who are not typing out the pinyin--they are using it as flashcards, so they always press show and then grade themselves. In order to support that use case better, we changed it to the way it currently is.

You can press the "correct" button (or the down arrow) to show it and mark it wrong in one step, although I know that's a bit of a workaround.

what about an option in the settings to allow the user to choose whether the default is correct or wrong?

We don't want to add any minor options like that unless we really can't avoid it, otherwise we'll end up with pages upon pages of options trying to confuse everyone. They're also work to implement, maintain, and support, causing problems where everyone has slightly different configurations.

I don't use the reading feature, but it seems strange that the default action supports the users who are not using the feature in the way that it was intended to be used, while those who follow along with the spirit of the reading feature end up having to take an extra step. I would think that it should be optimally designed for people who type out the pinyin, and those who just use it as a flashcard should accept that it's not intended to be used that way so they may have to go through an extra step to achieve their desired results.

Just my two cents. At this point it might just be best to leave the system how it is so as not to cause a bunch of users to have to adapt their styles, but I feel like a feature should be optimized for those who use it as intended rather than those who use it differently from its intended use.

FatDragon, that's a good point. But it's so unpleasant to go through the "you're wrong" step on every prompt, without any workaround, that the users who wanted to do it this way were very insistent, and I thought their points were very convincing, too.

Wasn't Skritter supposed to be better than flashcards? :)
But OK, I don't want to make it some bloodthirsty crusade. My desire for revenge would by satisfied sufficiently with my awareness how much they're missing out :D

Thanks for your understanding, Noqa! I feel the same way.

I agree to your statement(s) from a logical point of view, but I really like it this way, especially, if I have to do a lot of reviews, I want to do it as fast as possible. If I don't have to do many reviews, I also write it down. For those few cases, where I don't have a clue at all about the pinyin, I can manually set it to wrong instead of during the fast review have to do it for each and every item to set it manually to right.