Is there an option for not prompting tones and writing at the same time? I finally took the plunge into studying tones, and the current behavior is problematic. When I study writing, I want to be prompted with sound, which is disabled when it tries to feed me tones at the same time. I see no reason why the two need to go together.

Also, it would be nice to have some kind of staggered addition system. First, it would start querying you with the character. After you have learned it up to some level (a weekish?), it would start querying you for the tone. Then, once you've got that, add in definitions.

on the Practice page, in Settings, you got the options to check or uncheck what you want to review: Writing, Tones, or Definitions.

Combining writing and tone prompts makes things better from a scheduling perspective. When you see one part of a prompt passively when practicing another part, it spaces them out. But it's not that solid a mechanism, so we try to avoid doing it by combining the two prompts when possible.

You could temporarily disable writing, clear all your tone reviews, and then turn writing back on. Or the other way around.

The staggered addition sounds complicated, but interesting. Can you explain the reasoning some more?

Yeah, I can see how that would mess up the spaced repetition. I'm having a similar problem because the definition practice isn't synchronized. Tricky.

The notion is that the brain is better at accumulating information into a pre-existing structure than trying to throw together something totally new from a bunch of stuff at once.

So you would (hear the sound + see the definition --> write the character) many times. Then hopefully the prompt works backwards: you (see the character --> hear the sound), which you reinforce through tone quizzing.

Well, you guys are the experts, and I suck at tones. So maybe that's evidence that my ideas about how to learn tones are pretty flawed...

It might save on number of reviews total, but I think the added complexity in implementing it, plus the long delay before learning some parts of the word, would outweigh that. Maybe we will try something similar, with a shorter delay between introduction of the new parts (like a couple hours), so that the spacing isn't as messed up.

(I'll follow up with a slightly related issue...)

Continuing on the idea of the "staggered" approach, I really find it much easier to learn a new word by starting with writing first, and then later doing the definition practice. As it is now, when I enable "definitions" studying, new words appear first as definitions.

It is my impression that tones in isolation are only practiced after writing the characters. It would be good to have, in the same way, definition come in after "some time". The "weekish" time sounds about right, or maybe even better some kind of retention threshold, so I only get the definition added to the queue when the writing is sufficiently good.

Interesting. The reason we started introducing the definitions first is that it's much harder to accidentally prime the writing, whereas it's easy to do that with the definition. If we introduced writing first, we'd probably have to wait much longer (perhaps a week as you describe) before introducing the definition. Otherwise you'll just get it right the first time because you'll have recently seen it while reviewing the writing.

Others' thoughts on in what order the different parts should be introduced?

If writing is the hardest part, it should probably come first, otherwise there will be a growing wave of items after the spacing wears off waiting to crush you. So yeah, I think writing should come first.

I've been thinking about this point recently, especially with the definition practice. I definitely think the writing should come first - sometimes I have words in the list I haven't seen before. Without studying the writing first, it is hard if not impossible to know the definition from looking at the character.

I like having the tones being tested at the same time as the writing, otherwise I tend to ignore the tones until I am forced to pay attention.

I think a week would be a little long for me to introduce the definition practice. I'd prefer more on the order of a day or so. I see where you are coming on the priming issue, but I'm not that worried about it. There are so many alternative ways you could be primed in daily practice outside of skritter that trying to account for it just seems too hard. Maybe just slow the growth of the definition interval for the first week or so, so that it gets onto a different schedule?

Also I think a lot of vocab testing is done on a weekly basis - waiting one week to introduce definitions could make it less practical as an aid.

I think tones and writing at the same time is a good idea because the tone is one aspect very important in distinguishing Chinese words but at the same time most difficult for a learner to grasp. By repetitively practicing the tones, maybe one would memberizing them more faster.
However, I don't agree that writing should proceed the definition. Writing a character without knowing what it means is like sculpturing without knowing what you want to express. Wouldn't it make more sense if you have an idea or an image in mind before you beging to do the sculpture?