When it asks for the pinyin, does Skritter expect me to get the correct tones as well?

What I do now is that if I remember the pinyin but mess up the tones I mark it as 'so-so'.

Is this on the web or in the iOS app? On the web, it grades the tones separately on its own according to what you typed, so you shouldn't have to manually regrade anything. On the iOS app, it's up to you, but I rely on the separate tone items to fix any tone mistakes instead of rolling them into the pinyin items, so I only grade myself on whether I got the reading right.

Nick, I thought if you marked the pinyin item as correct then it would also mark tone item marked correct (without testing it)? So if you only marked pinyin items based on whether you got the correct reading, wouldn't that mess up your tone items? Or have I misunderstood?

Are you asking about the web or the iOS? I'll go check how it works to make sure.

I use both. I was just surprised when you said you only grade pinyin based on reading rather than tone.

I personally turned off the tone test and mark the reading correct only if I know the correct pinyin (I don't seperate the phonetic and tone).

I once read an analogy that knowing the phonetic without the right tone is kind of like remembering the right consonants in an english word, but with the wong vowels.

Panyan wuth wring tunes os herd ta enderstind.

I try and do them separately, but will also try and remember the tones with pronunciation and also meanings and vice versa when doing meanings try and remember pronunciation. I usually find its not clear enough whether its a definition or promunciation which is why I have come to recall both for each one. Maybe if it was more prominent I would just recall what is required.

On iOS, tone item reviews are not submitted as part of doing the pinyin item reviews. So if you have both enabled, you'll see them separately, and they'll be scheduled independently. It will be up to you whether the pinyin items need to be graded as "pinyin and tones" or "pinyin regardless of tones", as long as you're consistent.

On the web version, the pinyin and tone prompts are grouped, such that when you type in the reading with tones, it will grade them independently and submit both. If you type in the wrong pinyin for a character, or if the character has a different pinyin in this word than it does listed on its own, it can't submit a tone review, so the tone review is skipped. So if you don't type in anything, for example, then you don't get the character-level tone reviews.

If you manually grade a word's pinyin prompt on the web, then that sets the score for both the pinyin and tone items for the word. So to answer your question for the web, 懒虫: yes, marking pinyin prompts as correct regardless of tone would mess up your tone items. On iOS, they're independent, so no, it wouldn't.

In general on the web, unless you really want to avoid typing, you'll get better behavior from typing out the pinyin prompts instead of manually grading them. And if you meant something different than you actually typed, then you can also retype it the way you meant and resubmit to correct the grading that way.