Is there a way to stop the character from disappearing when you start to write (the one that appears when you hit 'Show')? I swear I saw an option to do so in a settings menu somewhere before, but now I can't find it.

I don't know of any, but I actually like this feature a lot

It used to work like that three years ago, but we found that it was incredibly ineffective for learning anything. You could trace a character a dozen times and then turn off the outline and have no idea how to write it. So we do force the fade on you.

I don't mind the fade per se, but it happens very often (like more than 50% of the time) that I draw a character well enough to pass it, but it looks ugly for some reason - either I connected two lines that shouldn't have been, or the general balance is off, or I didn't extend this line enough, whatever. In these cases, I choose Erase, and then Show, and I'd like to trace the character a few times to work on correcting these errors.

But, since the character disappears, I have to write a few strokes, then hit Show again, then write a few more, sometimes repeating the process two or even three times for complex characters, which as you can imagine is somewhat annoying and slows me down considerably.

I'd like to trace these as I quiz, and not have to go to scratchpad or somewhere else to work on these characters. Would it be possible to give us the option to turn off the disappearing for characters that are already learned, or maybe less than a certain percent due or something? I'd rather just be able to turn it off completely, but I understand what you are saying about the learning. I just really want it off for characters that I am passing in the quiz (some of which have been 'learned' for weeks), but for whatever reason still aren't passing my personal aesthetic test.

@Valymer I take a similar approach but on paper - if I made small mistakes like the ones you mentioned (aesthetic rather than learning) I either mark it as 'so-so' or 'correct' (depending on how hard on myself I'm being that day!) and practice the character on paper for a few minutes until I'm 100% satisfied with how it looks.
This is because no matter how awesome Skritter is, I still find it useful to get used to writing a character smaller, with pen and paper.
Anyway, maybe that would help your situation without changes to Skritter?

That's a good idea, Catherine, thanks. I will try to make a note of the ones I'm having the most trouble with while I quiz, then perhaps save them all up and practice them all at once at the end of the week.

I have come across the following website that will allow you to create practice paper with characters that are semi-opaque so you might find this useful for your paper based practice;

http://www.hanzigrids.com/

@HappyBlue Wow, that website is great. Generating them manually with word/excel always took a long time. Thanks :)

The front page of Hanzigrids is not very inviting because they show printed characters in their examples, but I guess that´s corrected inside (I didn´t register)

@StEskil,

I haven't looked into the site too much, but you add the characters you want and it adds those in the first column - adding no words means that you get a blank practice sheet.

As an additional option, you can have the characters visible in more than just the first column, you choose how far across the page the characters are visible and also if they are fully visible or faded. You can even choose how visible or faded the guide lines are.

I only came across the site a few days ago and haven't played much, I'm sure other Skritter'ers would appreciate any feedback you've got if you do use it :)

@StEskil I just tried it and you're right. That's a shame, I always use KaiTi on my own sheets but it looks like they've used SimSun or something similar, and there's no option to change it :( and I thought it was so useful!

It still probably helps with learning but if you're using it to practice nice-looking characters, it's not doing the job.

I got in touch with the guys behind the site and asked about using a hand-writing font as opposed to a typed font and there is now an option to use the KaiTi font!

I hope that this is better for you guys and it's useful for your purpose :)

Wow cool, thanks HappyBlue!

Huh, nice work, thanks!

Thats what I do - write any character I don't know or get wrong or slightly wrong down on paper and practise it a few times.

I realize this is a old thread, but its worth mentioning. If you ever plan to do real handwriting in chinese, you should have all of the character in your head before you start writing, ie you need to know where each stroke is going to start and finish before starting to write, so that when you actually start writing the character, it is one long continuous flow of movement.

I was not very convinced by the above statement, until it became clear to me that my Chinese teacher could actually tell when you stopped for a second when writing a character, ie she seemed to be able to tell from stroke angle or something that you seemed to stop.

So I set out to do exactly this, I try to "see" the character on the paper before I write it, and it really helps, especially with proporitons/weights of the components.