Hi,

I've been using Skritter to study for about 3 days now, and I love it. The only flaw I've noticed, however, is that Skritter doesn't really teach the English definition of the words one is learning; I now have a few undefined words floating around in my mind.
The question, then, is how to fix that, and I think one of the best ways would be to have Skritter say the Chinese word and show the characters, then ask for a definition. It could also work in reverse (e.g. Skritter gives the English, and you type in or draw the character).

Cheers,

Gregory

Hi Gregory, welcome to Skritter!

You're quite right. We've done almost all the architecture for pinyin and definition practice, and what remains is to do the front-end interaction design. No small task, but we're most of the way there.

So then there will be four parts to a prompt: the writing, the tone, the pinyin, and the definition. You'll be able to do the tone either with the writing or with the pinyin, and it gets scheduled separately; that'll make things more efficient, since you don't want to practice the whole pinyin when you just get the tone wrong.

The definition prompting will happen such that you're given the character, potentially prompted for the pinyin and tone (or just given them, if they're not due for review), and then prompted for the definition. We're hoping to have it so that you can type a word from the definition, to get the active recall in there that way, although it'll probably turn out that for definition practice you'll have to mark yourself right/wrong more than other prompt types.

Along with all of this, you'll be able to turn off which parts you don't want to study, and hopefully selectively add parts for some words and not for others.

It's going to rock. Thanks for your patience!

Glad to hear you guys are working on it!

I've found a couple times that I'll be reading, look at a character, know I've drawn it a dozen times, know exactly how to draw it, remember what I thought of the character, but can't quite pull out the definition...

Great site though!

But what about characters that have 5 or 6 definitions ?

I have had the thought before that Skritter could add a multiple-choice test : 5 characters, 7 English words, user picks and chooses ( or some such ) .
This doesn't seem like a tough programming task, and it shouldn't require much bandwidth !
It fits well with 'Torture's point.
The excess English could be excess Hanzi, the point is that elimination doesn't actually guarantee any answers.

Multi-choice sounds better than the alternative. Take the whole definition, add the complete definition of 3 other skritter words/characters and then make the user pick. Make sure you include an "I don't know button"

Personally, I don't see myself using the chinese->english feature for all the old words I have already added. I might not use it at all.

The exception is chengyu, when you implement the feature please make an option to only use it for words with character length of 4 or more.

Multi-choice doesn't really use active recall, though.

I've used flashcard systems that make you type in the actual definition. This definitely forces you to use active recall and is very effective, but it locks you into the precise wording of the definition, which is not desirable.

Not sure what the best way of dealing with this is. Looking forward to seeing what the Skritter folks come up with.