I am getting close to 1000 characters and can feel the power of the character components working on my brain. "Chunking" is a well-known memory technique where you encode several facts at a time using other previously-known facts; in the case of Chinese characters the chunks are the reused components, whether they be radicals or characters in their own right. When I already know the components, learning a new character is much, much, much, much easier, but often I don't know the component and so am stuck learning a new component together with a new compound character.

That suggests to me that, in order to efficiently chunk characters, you would need to study them in order starting with the basic components and building up to the compounds that use those components (à la Heisig). This is not currently how Skritter works, but it could be done manually with custom lists.

I'm wondering how you plan to design the component study system, and if it would be possible to have a "study components first" option for the scheduler that would notice that character 辆 is made up of 车 and 两 and then queue the components for study before we study 辆. I am referring here to initial exposure to the character, not to the spaced repetition review schedule.

James

This last idea - of something like a "study components first" option - sounds very good to me. I often find myself looking up components in MDBG to see whether they're characters in their own right, and then making a mental note of them (and adding them to my queue when possible).

I've been thinking about this concept lately. Not only components of an individual character, but how much easier it is to learn a new word/phrase when you've already learned all the component characters. Such as knowing 东 and 西 and then learning 东西. If I were designing my own course I would be all about optimizing learning potential by focusing on these building blocks and their mix and match combinations. It's exponential!

That's a great idea. Not sure if we will do it like that, but definitely we'll something along those lines.

One thing I was thinking would be that you could click on the components if you wanted to add them, because you didn't know them. That way, you only need to add those you both don't know and want to study independently, but it's still really easy to add the components you need during practice. What do you guys think of that?

that would be awesome!

Nick, I think this will be a good feature.