Hi,

For some reason I've been doing this for a couple of weeks now. I know the characters in the word but not in the right order... I keep writing 市城，场市 and 演表 instead of 城市，市场 and 表演 respectively. I'm probably inverting about 20% of all bigrams... and it's quite frustrating. Has anyone experienced the same after learning the first 1000 characters? Is it a common phenomenon when learning bigrams? Maybe I'm bound to confuse some words like my Italian friends who claim that: "your phone is in the chicken!!" instead of kitchen...

When I do this, it's because the first character is easy for me and I naturally want to do the one I'm anticipating is hard. I find myself starting to write the easy first character, missing it, marking it right, and skipping to the next one to start writing the one that was in my head. Not ideal, but not too much of a hassle; I don't do it that often.

You mention that you've just started doing this a couple weeks ago. Was it not a problem before then?

It would be great if Skritter could help prevent this problem, but off the top of my head, I can't think of a good solution. Any ideas?

Nick: yeah it's been going on for the past weeks. I'm learning more words but less new characters and the words I'm learning are based on characters I already knew. This could be a reason... Not a big deal, some dyslexic tendency perhaps... I thought there'd be some science or literature on learning bigrams for foreigners that could have enlighten me...

I do this from time to time as well, but have always felt it was because I remember the last thing I did better than the first.

For example, with Chinese I spend a lot more energy focusing on characters, so it seems only natural that the end of the word would stick in my mind more. Especially with those words with characters I already know and am just grazing over.