I am sure this has been mentioned before but I can't find the right search terms to confirm it.

When you move the cursor around in the writing area, shadows of the correct stroke appear, basically allowing you to write characters that you don't know.

I am studying Japanese.

I find skritter too helpful as it is :o.

Yes, that's what it does. It works something like, if the mark you made is "close enough" (based on strictness, I think) to one of the next three correct strokes, then it will accept it and "flash" the correct stroke if the one it took is (say) the second or third next one. And it has been suggested that it would be nice to turn off this "flashing" for those who don't want it. I also think it has been suggested that it would be nice if one could tell it not to take any stroke out-of-order, but I don't think there is a control for that. Strictness, for example, does not (I think) affect that.

Skritter flashes to correct stroke order, like skdbhunt said, but it also flashes the next stroke if you guess incorrectly enough times. Sometimes I find myself drawing a few random strokes so I can get the one stroke hint, and then afterwards marking it as "don't know/forgot", depending on how guilty I feel.

The main problem I have, is that some characters I know fully, and some characters I know based on how Skritter aligns the previous elements...

@Byzanti: Haha! Yeah, me too.

Dooo, generally, if you write a character you didn't know based on Skritter's "hints", you should mark it wrong or so-so. Hopefully you won't have to grade manually like this too often, but some of it is unavoidable.

Byzanti, our proposed solution for that is to integrate component breakdowns into the writing such that the strokes wouldn't snap-to until you had finished a component. Long ways off, though, that.

Skdbhunt, strictness does control how far out of order you can write a stroke. It's currently not tuned too well, because even at full strictness it can sometimes accept one place out of order, but that's just a bug. Strokes further out of order are harder to get recognized.