I personally feel that asking for the pinyin and asking for the tone is the exact same thing, since you have to prounounce it either way. The only the difference is the pinyin prompt gives you the character as the hint, whereas the tone prompt gives you the definition AND the character as the hint. I feel like since the writing prompt is already testing definition -> character... perhaps the tone prompt questions should NOT have the definition written there? There is a setting to "turn reading off" but that just hides the pinyin. I try not to look... but the phone is so small and my will is weak. Am I alone in this habit of trying to not look? Would it be possible to make "hide definition" a setting? If the definition is already there... I don't get the opportunity to try and remember it myself. I like testing myself on all the components regardless of the prompt (and I often grade myself that way too).

But if you did this, tone and pinyin questions would truly be the same... except for the cool input method.

I guess i'm also curious as to why the 4 types of questions you built into the program allowed for this redundancy? Why not prompt for the pinyin given the definition as the hint since that is not currently tested in isolation? Then (with definitions in tone questions hidden) you would have all 3 parts (reading, writing, pronunciating) isolated in 4 distinctly different questions with no overlap:

definition -> character (writing questions)
character -> definition (definition questions)
character -> pronunciation (tone questions)
definition -> pronunciation (pinyin question)

I totally agree. Lots of people have requested hiding the English definition while doing tone practice.

There was a thread on this topic 3 months :

http://ios.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=238227852

yeah, I think cheating is the closest word I can come to describing it.

If the tone prompt is 辍学, and you look at the first character and are thinking "umm??", and then you look over at the English and see that it says "drop out of school", and suddenly recall "chuo4xue2", then that screws up the practice. Especially because this often happens super quickly and you don't know how to grade these ones. Mark them right? Mark them wrong?

Can we get hidden definitions? Tons of people have asked for it, and there have been multiple threads about this going back a long time

Actually, it's even worse. The "recommended" solution for notes when your local pronunciation is different from the standard is to make a custom definition that makes a note of this.

This is most common for tones, but if you see that definition (with note) during your tone study, completely defeats the purpose.

It's still on my list to try out the hidden definitions, but I haven't gotten to it yet.

@Nick
any idea how long it will be until you get to this ?

No, sorry.

it's cool.

What I've been doing, which others can try out as well, is pretty much using definition practice as both tones/definitions practice together, because it doesn't show you the definitions, so you can't cheat with the tones. Ideally we would be able to do definition practice and no-cheating tone practice separately, but till then this is an alternative