I have seen a few posts on the forum from people with good skritter skills but that have difficulties writing characters using pen and paper. I am certainly belong to those that fail in the p&p hand writing department.

Despite the skritter team's advice to do dedicated pen and paper exercises, I thought something like an extreme 'raw squigs' mode for skritter might actually do the trick as well.

By this I have system in mind would check the character only when it is completely written. This means there would be no interim checks on correct strokes. This would probably require an additional button or some sort of gesture to tell the software that one is done writing and that it should now check, which somewhat might interrupt the flow of writing.

However the big advantage of this is that the system does not give away clues anymore while writing. From my experience this is the biggest obstacle not being able to reproduce my skritter skills on paper. On paper there are simply no clues. Without the hints from skritter I then often get stuck. Although I notice if I ask my Chinese teacher what the first radical of the character is, then I usually can produce it.

My suggestion for this extreme raw squigs mode is that the system should only tell one after completing a character if it is correct or not without any interruptions.

I wonder if anyone has any thoughts or ideas if this could work. Would it be difficult to implement?

Thanks for your feedback and happy skrittering!

hannes,

How do you use Skritter? Are you using your mouse? Or are you using a pen input with your computer?

I don't even use the Skritter input box to write characters anymore. I use a pen and paper in front of the computer. When I don't know the character, I hit "reveal," mark the character wrong, and write it a few times on the paper. When I do know the character and have written it out fine on paper, I use the space bar to skip to the next character. I've basically got my left hand on the space bar and my right hand writing on paper in front of my computer the entire time. I even draw the tones on the paper when they are prompted.

My guess is that you're using a mouse. I made that mistake the first couple months with Skritter. I don't have the funds for a Wacom (hence the hours of cramming this month to win one!), but my paper solution has sent my character & vocab count skyrocketing the last 6 months.

Also, it looks like you have a lot of characters you are studying, but very few words. Funny as it sounds, I really struggled to write single characters, but words came a lot more easier. Someone on the board advised deleting all your single characters, so that you are doing multiple character words. I deleted about 800 single characters from my list (characters that are parts of words I already have in my queue), and my productivity drastically increased as well.

I see the advantage in what you're saying hannes, but I can't see how it would be implemented without slowing practice down, and also I wonder if it work with with the current stroke level detection. I also think you can probably get 80% of way there by just being strict with yourself on raw squigs.

@atlouis: I use a wacom tablet and changed from characters to words practice in the second half of last year. I followed the discussion on characters vs words and basically agree. In my practice routine there are hardly single characters coming up anymore. However I think there is still some value in going through a perhaps difficult phase of learning a stock of single characters first before entering into the words learning game as some other people mentioned earlier as well.

Coming back to the question of writing with pen and paper I can say that I am actually not overly concerned by my rather weak skills. The major value added using skritter to me is to actively learn and memorize words. Active in contrast to using flashcards for example which don't work for me.

However if ther is a way to also improve my writing skills even more in this process then this would be great. Hence my curiosity about having some sort of extreme squigs mode.

How often/when do you write? I take Chinese courses during the school year and have to write by hand to answer homework questions, during tests, 听写, etc., and also double check what I've done on Skritter by quizzing myself on the lesson's vocab by hand. That seems to be enough for me that I can usually make the leap from Skritter to writing by hand no problem - I rarely specifically practice writing by hand.

Actually I was thinking about an idea similar to what hannes is describing the other day while I was skrittering. I agree with him that this would be beneficial to learning kanji writings and remembering them without assistance. Personally, I think there should be features like this idea built into skritter, but I also think it'd be nice to be able to choose which of these features I am using. For example, this is a great idea that many have probably thought of, but everyone might not want to use it so it could be listed as optional. Ultimately though it is beneficial for those that would like to use it.

The thing I would like the most, which everyone may not choose to use, is to be able to write okurigana (the kanji along with the Japanese kana for a given word such as 行く. Currently we can only write the kanji 行 when practicing Japanese). Of course this would come after writing kana itself is designed, but eventually I'd like to see skritter going in that direction. Until then, I have to find more ways to practice. Skritter is just one of many tools I use to learn.

One trick I find helpful to ensure I don't make use of the stroke-by-stroke hints is to take a moment to think about the whole character before I start writing. You often realise if there's a part you're not confident about and can grade it accordingly.

What Byzanti said. Use Khatzumoto's rule: if you were even a little doubtful, even if you got it right, mark it wrong. I've been using raw squigs for a long time and am very strict grading myself, and I have no problem writing by hand even though I rarely practice it.

James

I think character-level recognition would be way cool, but I don't think it's a practical short-term goal for the Skritter team, so I say grade yourself harshly with raw squigs or go pen and paper like others have suggested for now.

Or, as James suggested, get a little tougher on yourself with characters you need those hints for. If you got a hint from a misplaced or misread stroke, and you think it helped you in your ability to write the character, mark it as a 1 or 2 to ensure that you learn it properly, rather than learning it halfway and moving on.

I have some plans to try something like this out, except I also want to try where it doesn't recognize until you complete each radical (as opposed to the whole character). But I don't know if it will work, and I will have to do a bunch of work on the recognition engine to try it out, so it's not a high priority.

The current problem with waiting until the end to do recognition is that it is too likely to miss an intermediate stroke and then cause all the rest to fail. The solution would be the same upgrade to the recognition engine to recognize multiple strokes at once to help determine when Skritter misrecognized one, so I will have to wait to try the write-whole-character approach until I do that code, too.