A few people here have said how they switched to characters only in Skritter to make it more efficient.

I think there should actually be a study option that works like this: for writing prompts, you only do characters. Otherwise it's all the same as normal - reading, definition, tone for words and characters. But writing is just characters.

I think this would be massively more efficient than writing out entire words when you know all of the characters anyway.

Thoughts?

It would probably be more efficient, as long as you can still fully learn the words from the other parts.

Personally, I wouldn't use it as I wouldn't learn where to use homonyms - for example, the various uses of yi (已经, 一起, 以后, 意思, 一定, 以前, etc.) may seem obvious to some people, but could need a lot of practice! The best/only way to do this is writing words.

Well yeah, it should definitely be an option, not default.

When you see and use a word often enough to remember which characters it is, it's not that helpful to re-study how to write those characters as part of the word. You just need to remember which ones they are and that's it.

Doing the reading, definition and tone prompts should be enough for that (and actually using Chinese day to day).

Yeah, that's true. I have found myself practising words like 星期六 and thinking perhaps this is a waste of time!

Great idea! I'm in favour.

It's really hard to build that, given how everything is set up right now. I'm not sure we will ever do it. Would a feature of automatically skipping characters in words that you know really well, when there's one character in the word that you don't, fulfill a similar function?

I'm not to the point where I am so flooded with reviews that I need such functionality, but I suspect that day will come in the next 6-12 months (as the daily reviews slowly but steadily grow).

What I'm wonder is how do you folks study for the fact that all the words you know are composed of unique characters? On Skritter, eliminating the writing prompt for words mean you would only see the pinyin, definition and tone prompts - never a prompt that tests if you remembered the composition of the word. I'm just curious if at that level you simply don't feel the need (i.e. those compositions are remembered so much more easily)?

Further to that, why wouldn't you keep word prompts and simply reveal them immediately, marking them as failed, so-so or good depending on how well you recalled (in your mind) which characters they included. If they really are easily recalled (and thus justify removal) I imagine most prompts would take a second or so; this ensures that you still are being tested on the way words are formed (by different characters) and some of the trickier ones will still show up more often.

As I said, I'm not there yet so I'm trying to get an idea of how I'll adjust once I am. At the moment revealing the entire word and self grading (perhaps only at extremes - 1 or 3/4) seems the most consistent with really learning the word, but I suppose if you are reading a ton of native material it may just be a time sink...

great idea. I'm at the point where I have about 30 words a day, mostly with characters I have learned before (about 5 new characters a day), and having them all come up as writing prompts is too slow. I'm going to have to download all my lists, isolate all the characters in excel, and make a new 'characters only' set.