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I have seen definition practice....

jcardenio   December 9th, 2009 12:11p.m.

in the language settings tab, and it is wonderful

scott   December 9th, 2009 12:41p.m.

Give it a try!

jww1066   December 9th, 2009 12:43p.m.

One mystery: I have "show grading buttons" turned off, but when I enabled definition practice, they showed up.

James

nick   December 9th, 2009 12:51p.m.

You need to use grading buttons for definition practice right now, because there is no active input. You can just use correct/incorrect and ignore the 2 and 4 buttons, but I wanted to be clear about how the scoring should be done. Make sense?

jcardenio   December 9th, 2009 12:56p.m.

First thing I notice for the definition practice is that I'd like to be able to not see the pinyin until after I answer. I'd prefer to have to examine the characters rather than just glance at the pinyin... english is just too much of a temptress when I can see both

balsa   December 9th, 2009 1:08p.m.

ok, maybe it's because it's the end of the my day here, but I have checked the definition option, I do see the "show grading buttons" appear, but everything else looks the same as before... is that normal? or an option for those subscribed? I feel I am missing something...

nick   December 9th, 2009 1:12p.m.

Good idea, I think (for Chinese). I've changed it; what do you think?

jcardenio   December 9th, 2009 1:14p.m.

That was quick! Just had one pop up, I definitely like it. Had to actually look at the characters and remember pronunciation and meaning. It's everything I've dreamed of.

balsa   December 9th, 2009 1:33p.m.

ok,I get it, I just selected Definitions only and it gave me the message that I had to add characters to the Vocabulary page which is subscribed only :)

well, at least, and I don't know if it was already there before, but I just found that I could practice Writing or Tones only ^_^

Cheers~

nick   December 9th, 2009 1:40p.m.

Right, you would need to add new vocab to add new definition items, and you can't add new things when your subscription isn't active.

I've given you an extra day, uy, so that you can check the definition practice out if you want.

Xerxes314   December 9th, 2009 2:42p.m.

I'm seeing some strange fonts during definition practice. Like 包 with a 己 instead of a 巳; is that allowed? Also, sometimes characters come up with serif fonts instead of the usual sans-serif.

nick   December 9th, 2009 3:02p.m.

At least you're seeing the characters. On Scott's Linux Flash, it just left out any simplified character, seemingly regardless of which font I set it to. My searches haven't turned up any reasons or fixes. But I'll try some more things.

Xerxes314   December 9th, 2009 4:20p.m.

One more bug, I think: When you click the sound button during definition practice for a word, it only says the first character.

nick   December 9th, 2009 6:03p.m.

Fixed the font problem, I think; let me know. It may be that I need to add even more fonts to hit one that's on your system.

Fixed the sound problem.

jcardenio   December 9th, 2009 9:04p.m.

Small bug:
I've noticed every once in awhile (10% of the time?) that the buttons (1-4) don't work for definition practice. Clicking the button grades also doesn't seem to work. You have to hit space or click in the middle (arrow). I think it might happen more with words than individual characters but I'm not sure of that.

sonorier   December 10th, 2009 5:35a.m.

looks good, I only had it pop up a couple of times, but really cool. Some characters show up a little strange, I sent them via the bug report form.

I wonder how you are going to automate this process though? For pinyin it will be easy, but english definitions...there are many ways to translate and what about small spelling errors for us non-native english people.

good luck man

You made my day by putting this online so we were able to use this feature unexpectedly :D

sonorier   December 10th, 2009 5:48a.m.

also...

how will you count the learned words with pinyin practice? One is learned characters (writing) and one is learned characters (reading)?

nick   December 10th, 2009 10:32a.m.

Still not sure what's causing the grader unclickability, but there are two sightings now, one independent of definition practice. More information will be helpful if you can narrow it down.

I've got some good ideas for how to do the active mode of the pinyin and definition practice, such that spelling and typos aren't as big a deal. I'm not sure that active definition practice is that big a deal, though, given how easy it seems to do it this way.

The words/characters learned will probably just count the part (writing, reading, definition) that is the highest. The progress page needs to be beefed up soon to handle the different parts as well. So you'll be able to see your words - writing, words - reading, etc. counts, as well as the same for characters.

jcardenio   December 10th, 2009 1:08p.m.

I'm not sure if you've changed something, but I have yet to see the bug today after ~ 150 reviews. (I was going to try to figure out the word/click sequence when it happened.) I'm pretty sure it was happening much more frequently yesterday.

The only thing different on my end is the number of new words added, (I was having that same bug with it saying 0 in the queue).

sonorier   December 10th, 2009 1:55p.m.

I agree, it does not have to be active, because i think it would be too hard to implement. I just thought you you wanted this. I like it as it is.

cheers
Steven

sarac   December 11th, 2009 8:42a.m.

Thanks for the definition practice - it is certainly helpful and rounds out the Skritter usefulness. At first I was seeing an odd, blocky font but yesterday it switched to a nicer, more flowing style - better.

A question about what characters/words appear for definition practice: I believe I read, and it's consistent with what I've seen, that only the items added after you installed the feature will show up for definition practice. Since that time I have added old characters using the magnifying glass and plus sign next to the character components. Therefore these already-practiced writing/tone characters also get definition practice. Is that right?

If so, this only works for characters that show up as word elements and for which one clicks and submits as characters for practice. It would be tedious to do this all the time and tedious to go through one's entire list to request definition practice but I see that all the vocab lists have an entry for definition practice. I am not sure I would actually use it (since it would add a LOT of items to my review list) but how about a one-time option for users to add definition practice to their existing lists?

nick   December 11th, 2009 10:49a.m.

What you could do is to go to the vocabulary lists you've already gone through and activate their first section. Then when it adds, it will add the missing definition parts.

If you do this, though, be sure to mark "4" on definitions that you already know really well, the first time you see them. That will minimize the amount of extra study on words you don't need.

jww1066   December 11th, 2009 2:16p.m.

@nick: How can I re-add all the items we already added through the queue? I use the queue very extensively and don't know how to re-add those items.

James

nick   December 11th, 2009 5:12p.m.

Sorry, there isn't a way to do this right now. One thing you could do is export all the items you've learned, put them into the queue or into a custom list, and then readd your way through that.

It'd probably be worth your time to filter out words whose definitions you didn't need to study on Skritter before doing that, though.

jww1066   December 13th, 2009 12:21p.m.

@nick: Thanks, that worked, although it was kind of a pain. I had 1,900+ items to re-add and filtering them would have taken a long, long time. When I tried to add all 1900+ to the queue in one shot it locked up Firefox, so I had to add them in batches of 500. The export is medium slow, the "validation" step even slower and the final "add to queue" step even slower. I'd estimate it took well over an hour, soup to nuts.

The definition practice itself is great, although I was a little confused when I first saw the screen and didn't realize I could use the "S" keyboard shortcut.

Another item is that the progress page and the progress emails don't yet reflect your definition progress, and it would be nice to add them. Not sure what you'd want to do with the graphs, though; maybe they could display characters, definitions, and eventually pinyin in different colors?

James

nick   December 13th, 2009 12:31p.m.

We've got some ideas for the progress page, but yeah, they probably won't include the new parts until next month.

We probably can't just put the different parts in the same graph because the ranges would be so different that you couldn't see very much, so we're looking at making a way to toggle between which parts are shown.

For the definition practice, what would you suggest to make it more intuitive at first? Also, did you know that the "?" is a cursor that you can click to show (like the next cursor clicks to go to the next one)? It should be even faster than using the keyboard shortcuts (at least it is for me).

jww1066   December 13th, 2009 3:25p.m.

Yeah, that's a good point, I also realized it shortly after I posted. If you really want to, you can put the different series on the same graph by using differently-scaled axes on the left and right, but that only works for two series at a time.

I did realize you could click to show the definition with the "?" and I thought that was the only way to show it until I played around a little. I think adding text to the effect "click or type 'S'" would also work if you have an aesthetically-pleasing place to put it. Maybe you could put it in a tooltip?

Something that still looks a little off is the size of the text when a definition comes up. When it's a single character, it's so much smaller than we're used to seeing that it looks kind of strange. I imagine you did this so that multi-character words fit. Maybe the characters could scale based on the number of characters in the word, so they use up all the available width?

James

nick   December 14th, 2009 11:48a.m.

Characters are square, so using up the available width would also use up the available height, some of which we need for the definition (and reading, to be added). But we could try bigger.

George is actually designing how the prompt should be laid out shortly. Right now it's just the first combo of font sizes, positions, and colors that fit while I was testing it. He better come up with something different or I'll accuse him of unjust insouciance.

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