I've started to get over 1,000 characters, and I'm wondering how to grade myself.

For example, I just received the prompt: "prevent; protect; guard against; avoid". I thought for sure this was the character 卫, but I was wrong. It's 防. It turns out the definition for 卫 is "to guard; protect; defend"

Once I hit the pinyin prompt and saw "fang", I knew for sure it was the character 防, and drew it.

Now, how would you rate yourselves? Normally I would have given myself a 2 ("so-so"), but I'm starting to find so many similar definitions. For example, 山水 and 景色 are almost exactly the same. I'm thinking that I should give myself a 3 ("got it"), even though I needed the pinyin prompt.

Any suggestions? How harsh do you grade yourselves?

Its really annoying how simple the definitions are to describe so many different characters. I don't have a solution to it, but if you want to mark yourself as wrong for not guessing which IF, OR, BUT, or AND Skritter is prompting you to write than I think that would be counter productive. If words like PRETTY, A FEW, SOME, or INTERESTING trip me up from time to time. I have some words from text books that have 好 on the front of them making it more difficult to remember exactly what was input before.

So, I make that kind of mistake dozens of times a day on Skritter and it has nothing to do with my Chinese ability. Instead if you are punishing yourself then you will only force yourself to memorize the minute differences in the definitions which I think is a waste of time.

When this situation comes up for me, I edit the custom definition. So for instance, for 卫, I might edit the definition to "to guard; protect; defend; _生纸". If you find yourself taking too long learning a character or word, you might give yourself even bigger hints such as "has 三撇儿 on the right" for the character 形.

I try and make myself think of the multiple possibilities form the definition, and then as long as it is one of them, I mark ok. Hopefully, it will be widening my vocabulary usage.

I used to hide pinyin too. At some point in the 1,000-1,500 characters range I realized I was spending WAAAAY too much time having problems like that, so I stopped.

James

I just try to ask myself whether I honestly know it or not and grade accordingly. For example, in some instance I might really be on a role, writing characters super fast many times in a row, and I'll hear the pinyin for a new character and go to write it without even looking at the definition. Skritter will tell me I'm wrong, and then I'll look at the definition and realize I'm thinking of a different word pronounced the same way, but written differently. No need to be over critical of myself, if I'm certain I know how to write the correct word I'll just grade it as a 3 and move on.

If it's one of a number of words/characters with close to the same meaning, I typically give myself a 3 if I can get it after checking the pinyin. If I have to check the pinyin without having any reasonable suspicions as to the answer, I give myself a 2, and if I have to show one or more characters it's a 1.

If I can't remember what word it's asking me for, I mark it wrong/red (hidden pinyin is on). If I do remember the word it's asking for, but write the wrong character, I mark it red. If I remember the word it's asking for, remember the right character, but forget how to write it correctly, I mark it red.

And if I get everything right it goes green. Although I do excuse myself for silly mistakes.

I have this system worked out. It seems to be worked for me for the past month or two, so I thought I'd share. My percentages have dropped a lot, since 2 counts as wrong, but I try to ignore it.

I give myself a 3 if:
I know the character/word on the first pass.
I know the character/word after guessing the wrong word with the same meaning.

I give myself a 2 if:
I'm off by a stroke or two.
I have to check the pinyin to get the correct writing.
I am correct for the requested prompt on the first pass, but have forgotten one of the other prompts that wasn't requested. Example: When asked for a meaning, I am correct but have forgotten the writing.
I am correct, and it is a "new word." Reason being, Skritter launches new words 3 weeks into the future if you happen to guess right, which I've found to be a problem.

I give myself a 1 if:
I forgot the character, or one of the characters in a word.
I flip-flop the order of the characters. This seems to happen to me a lot.. anyone else?

Definitions do need sorting out at some point. I am using the Japanese lists, and I just had the prompt "application". The word it wanted was 適用, but it could just have easily been 申し込み or something else.

It would help if those sorts of words had descriptors like "application (e.g. of a technology, of a law)", and "application (e.g. for a job, for a scholarship)", not just to differentiate them for reviews, but also to indicate how to use them if you don't already know them. (I am sure I am not the only lazy person who doesn't like to put the pen down to go look up what sense an ambiguous word actually has.)

More fundamentally, language learning is not about learning what possible translations there are of target words in your own language - if it was, we should all just give up and go and use Google Translate and the unsatisfactory results that brings. It is about being able to take a word and put it to appropriate use in sentences of that language. The way definitions are implemented should reflect that.

I'm pretty much the exact same story as jcdoss, but I don't really ever flip-flop the characters. I guess I kind of associate the characters with sounds as well as meaning. Not to mention, reading them in books every once in a while makes it hard to mix them up. If you don't already read books/comics in your target language I highly recommend it. It will make mistakes like that less common, it will give you words to add to your queue, and it will all around make you better at your language.

But yeah. I usually only mark it right if I remember everything, even the stuff I wasn't quizzed on. It brings down my retention rate percentage, but I couldn't care less, since I'm here to learn a language, not to place on some leaderboard.

I mark it too easy if it comes to me instantly, and I feel like it has been like that for a long time. I also mark it too easy if It comes up constantly in the Japanese books I read and thus needs no practice.

I agree generally with comments here although I can add that I don't think I could successfully learn Chinese using Skritter as my only tool although it serves its purpose extremely well.

I rely on my conversation practice and reading to help me discern the ambiguities and therefore learn proper usage of seemingly similar words. Tones,too, are better learned by listening to real (native) speech. For me, Skritter is the best reading and writing practice tool. By that I mean accurate recognition of characters and writing of specific characters; I do not aim to translate to/from a certain dictionary's definitions.

Therefore my grading is looser than some here suggest. I grade on my ability to write a character, maybe clearly given by a definition but I do not downgrade my score if I need to use the pinyin. For reading practice I grade myself on reproducing accurate pinyin but not exact definitions.

This goes back to something i said in another post. Basically how can you say you really know a word.

First of all you are not learning the definition, you are learning the translation. The definition would be in Chinese.

2nd, in the example given (景色、山水) I think I am right in saying that 山水 is a kind of hyponym of 景色 (in the same way that dog is hyponym of animal), something that seems quite important if you really think you know the words.

So, the definitions given on Scritter for 景色 are scenery; landscape and the translation given for 山水 is landscape. In my english-chinese dictionary 景色 is translated as scenery;scene;landscape;view. While 山水 is translated as 1. scenery with hills and water 2. traditional Chinese painting of mountains and water (my chinese dictionary gives a third meaning)

So basically what I would say is take the definitions/translations here with a large pinch of salt.

One more thing. What is most useful is when a word has more than one translation , because, for example, it is much easier to remember 1/4 than 1/1. So, with the above example 景色, it is much easier to remember one of the four translations given in my dictionary than the two found here. Really hate it when there is only one translation (especially when it's not something easy like a noun)!

Please, edit and improve the definitions to make them less ambiguous when you find those. It'll save you time, and if you can do it in a standard way, it'll help everyone else who has to study those words if you submit them as corrections.