The other day I was practicing, and it seems like a bug (or a feature?) made it so that I was only given the definition of the character to draw.

I wasn't able about to find anything related to that, but the setting do not have a "definition only practice".

In ZDT, I remember that I had such option, have english definition, guess pinyin, no drawing char though since ZDT never had that feature. I found it quite nice because it is really a check as to whether you know the character or not, whereas having the pinyin is kinda acting as memory crutches, does that make sense?
The only thing in this mode though, is that Skritter would only be able to keep track of the correctness of character drawn and the tone, unless, a space is available to type the pinyin, although having to switch between mouse and keyboard could be unconvenient, tricky there...

In case this topic has already been raised, sorry for bringing it up again!

It's a bug, which I'll be fixing shortly.

We won't have definition -> writing practice directly, without pinyin in the prompt, since it's too vague (could be many correct answers).

We will have character -> pinyin and character -> pinyin -> definition practice, as well as the current definition + pinyin -> writing practice.

And the tone practice can be broken out or included in the pinyin practice, and can get complicated, but it will work well, too.

When we have all these modes, we'll adjust the loading of prompts such that you don't have to switch between keyboard and mouse as often.

I am looking forward to that and I think it's quite important to have those different directionalities....but man is that going to double my review queue:)

I still remember the good ole' days: "you have 46 items ready to review."

Now I wake up to 250. And with pinyin and definition practice.....

Yeah; I'm thinking that with definition practice for sure, we'll want to encourage selective adding, so that you're really only adding definitions when you don't know them, instead of adding everything and quickly working through things you don't need work on (like we do with characters and tones).

Nick, Scott:

In a previous thread...

http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=6568361

...there was a discussion about the timing of new items. It's still the case that new items are clumped together toward the end of the review queue.

Is it possible to spread new items out more evenly? My concern is that as our number of review items increases, it will take longer and longer to reach the new material. Maybe veterans with long queues (400+) have experience in this regard.

Thanks for the feedback Nick.

As I was practicing today, I realized how on the Practice page, the pinyin is displayed with more emphasis than the definition.

Since it's not a good idea to remove the pinyin, what would you think of maybe switching the location of the pinyin and definition? Because as it is, I realized that I associate the character with the pinyin which is good of course, but it seems to deter remembering the definition. I realized that because I was reading a book today, recognized a word I learned thru Skritter :) but didn't remember the definition.

To say it in a clearer way, here's how I process things right now:
pinyin -> definition -> character
while I'd like it to be:
definition ( -> pinyin if many answers) -> character

I know that sounds very picky(!) but what do you think?

Thanks and looking forward to the next features release!

Murrayjames, it's a tricky thing to spread them out properly, because you don't want to overadd when someone is behind (as opposed to just accustomed to practicing a lot). This is the provenance of the Genius, which still needs a lot of tuning, and will generally be made better and better over time.

Uy, it's possible that pinyin will be deemphasized, or initially hidden in the cases where we have the word's audio, but I don't think we'll do definition-first prompting. It is not trivial to make and maintain a list of words that need to have pinyin included in the prompt because the definitions are similar to other words'.

We might try reordering the pinyin and definition in the prompt, but we'll have to see how the new design goes.