Hey guys. I don't know if this has been discussed before, but my quick forum search produced no relevant matches, so I'm just gonna throw this one out there.

I know skritter's all about actually learning to recognize and write characters, and it's become one of my most enjoyable vocabulary building tools. Recently however, I've realized that in my mind, there's a strong association between a given character and its english translation. Now, this is obviously very good. Usually, when I see the character, I also remember the tone and the pronounciation. The trouble is however, that it doesn't always go the other way around. If I hear a word used in a sentence, I may be completely clueless as to what I just heard, even if I've actually studied that word at length here on skritter. If I've got a transcript of what I'm listening to, I may get this wild raging epiphany when I actually see the character and realize "ahhh, it's THAT word!". I can imagine other people may be having the same problem.

It's not a big deal, but how feasible would it be to add a sound prompt mode? Obviously, pronounciation/sound isn't available for all words out there, but it would probably work for the majority of words being studied, at least in the lower levels where I'm currently at. I mean, you'd hear a word, and you'd have to draw the character from what you just heard. That'd certainly reinforce the sound-character association (in that order) that I personally find is currently lacking in Skritter's learning modes. Sure, you can get that kind of practice elsewhere, but wouldn't it be neat to have that here on Skritter? :-)

It would be neat, but because we don't have audio for all words, and because some words are homophones indistinguishable without context, and because this wouldn't work for single characters, it wouldn't be as practical to implement as one might think.

One thing you could do to test whether this is helpful to you is to turn on hidden reading mode, add a custom CSS rule to your browser to make the prompt definitions almost white (so that you don't read them without trying), and then press "A" to hear the audio for each prompt instead of looking at the definition. If you wanted to try that out and it turned out to be great, we could try a somewhat wider experiment. What do you say? If you need help figuring out how to do the custom CSS rule, let me know.

Superb, Nick! That's probably gonna suffice for me. I'll try it out. Thanks a lot. :-)