is the only way to make scratchpad lists to put in the words one by one ?

Are there any other ways?

The scratchpad at http://www.skritter.com/scratchpad is usually for quick lookups or non-logged-in users. You can paste a whole bunch of stuff into the scratchpad that you can get to at the bottom of the practice navigation page: http://www.skritter.com/practice

On either page, it will accept multiple characters and words and will strip out non-Chinese, so you don't have to worry about getting definitions and stuff in there. So yeah, just copy and paste.

Hope this helps!

Thanks Nick, this was helpful! And I assume that for copy and pasting, each Chinese words should be in a columm, so each word is on its own line, right? So for instance:

中国
日本
美国

instead of : 中国日本美国 or 中国，日本，美国

okay Nick, I've figured all of that out, but there's still one thing that's bugging me. After pasting or typing in a whole bunch of stuff into the scratchpad at the bottom of the practice navigation page and then clicking "cram” the scratchpad is missing my three favorite things:

1. the horizontal blue tab with the pinyin of the words in that cram list.

2. the shuffle buttom

3. The numbers that show me how far along I am in the cram list. For example:4 of 30 , or 23 of 47 .

If you guys would be willing to make a way for me to get those three things back, and be able to paste a bunch of words in easily ( just like it is for the other Skritter cram lists), I would be a really happy camper!

Turn progress tracking off for that. The reason it doesn't show up when progress tracking is on is because the words aren't coming in any linear order, but rather according to SRS.

Cool! Now is there any way to save lists that I can study later using this method?
For example, if I want to use the scratchpad to study words having to do with movie genres, and then two days later I want to study words having to do with cooking, can I go back to study the same movie genre list a week later, or would I have to make that list all over again?

Just make custom lists for these things. Then if you really want to study them on the scratchpad, you can export the words, copy them, and put them into the scratchpad box. Sounds harder than it is. We used to have cram lists for that, but they are going away and will be turned into custom lists.

alright, so I just did that and, like you said, it was really easy. There's only one little problem now. After I went to "export list" and copy/pasted traditional and simplified characters into the scratchpad on the bottom of the practice navigation page, only simplified characters showed up while I practiced. I went through the entire list and no traditional characters showed up at all. My Skritter settings are set to "Both", so I don't know why only the simplifed ones are showing up.

following up on my last comment, just above, I was playing around with it a bit to try if I can figure out a way to get both character sets to show up. One thing I did was export a list, then copy and paste the list and make put it into NJ Star and convert everything to one character set, and then copy/paste that into scratchpad, and then I went back to NJ star and converted everything to the other character set, and copy/pasted that into scratchpad, and when I started practicing, nothing changed. Only simplified characters showed up when I started practicing. I even went through the whole list twice, and still nothing

Currently to study a traditional version of a character, you need to have in the text field that actual character. I tested it locally and that's how it worked for me anyway.

When we replace the textfield with a proper widget for the job, it will work better for simplified and traditional. We're trying to consolidate how all these lists work, to avoid this kind of confusion! Sorry about that.

have in the text field that actual character? I don't understand. Can you be a bit more specific?

He means when you write in the scratchpad input box what you want to study, be sure to also include the traditional character/word also.

Hi Byzanti, I've done that. I put in both character sets into the scratchpad input box on the bottom of the practise navigation page

I mentioned that I did all of that in my comment on May 2nd, 2010 4:16p.m. Should I be doing it some other way?

I see the problem, and it only affects it with progress tracking off. I will prioritize a fix for this. Thanks for the debugging, Bohan!

Thank you sooo much Nick!!

Hi Nick and Scott (and others),

Any updates on this?

Not yet. I hope to get it going by tomorrow night.

This is done now. Not perfect, but works all right.

Hi Nick, thanks for the great news!

hey Nick, there's just a little tiny problem with the the scrathpad with off tracking. After making tonal mistakes, it eventually goes back to the characters we missed for review, but for some reason, I can't draw the tone into the scratchpad for those "missed characters" . I think what seems to be happening is, the system just keeps counting those as "missed" over and over again. Other than this, I haven't noticed any issues at all.

UPDATE: It's working perfectly now!!! I don't know what was going on the first couple of times I was on it, but the scratchpad is AWESOME now!!!!!!!!