Is there a way to prevent words that have been added for study from being broken down into individual characters when we study them?

A recent example in my study would be 圣诞节. I have no interest in learning 圣 and 诞 as individual characters right now - they don't belong to any other words I currently know, and I'd rather just keep them in the context of the whole word for the time being. Nevertheless, they keep showing up individually, which, for me, feels less efficient than exclusively working on the whole word - I have to recall them based on some unfamiliar and only halfway-useful definitions (because let's face it, most English definitions for individual characters are lacking because the characters aren't used that way, so the definition conveys an idea rather than a meaning) rather than keeping them contextual.

As I recall there's a setting for that - "Add individual characters when studying words" or something like that.

It's in account --> language settings

Not to tell you what to do :-) but there's a certain value in knowing the meanings of these characters in the words you come across. This will become more pronounced as your develop your vocabulary.

For instance, knowing that 圣 means "holy" doesn't just help you understand 圣诞节 better, though it does: 圣诞节= holy-birth-holiday. It also helps you with new vocabulary, because inevitably you will come across words like 圣经 (Bible), 朝圣 (pilgrimage), 大圣 (wise man; Confucius), and so on.

I recently moved to China, and between reading books, watching TV, and talking with friends, my input has quadrupled. I'm encountering new words all the time. Thing is, most of these words are made up of characters I've already learned. In the past week, knowing that 软 means soft has helped me with 软卧 (soft sleeper train), 软件 (software), and 软绵绵 (an expression meaning sentimental, and a character on that infernal cartoon 喜羊羊).

I don't know what level of Chinese you're at. Maybe you learned these words already, and without also learning the characters one-by-one. But on some level you're fighting the language if you do this. Brute memorization is a fact of life in English. Ask any foreign learner of the language: they learn cow, then beef separately; pig then pork, chicken then poultry, etc.. Chinese has brute memorization too, but it's more at the level of the character than the word. Knowing what 肉 means will make 牛肉，猪肉 and 鸡肉 that much easier to remember.

Thanks James and Byzanti - I should have looked for that myself, but sometimes I'm lazy.

@murrayjames - You're probably right, and I don't know if I'll turn off the individual character setting anyway, but it definitely slows me down in the short term, and I have a hard time taking definitions seriously for individual characters that aren't ever used on their own - I guess it's partially due to the fact that I'd rather work with a connotation than be tied to a denotation.

Oh, and congratulations on your recent wedding. Not that I know you, or know anything about your marriage, I just noticed your response to the group wedding post referring to yourself as a newlywed, so cheers on that.

Ah, I totally forgot to add the main thing I wanted to say there.

Devs - is there any way to weight words over individual characters. A significant part of the problem for me is that I might see 圣 and 诞 five or six times for every one time I see 圣诞节, to keep within the confines of the initial example. I bow to murrayjames' right thinking in that I need to learn the component characters for compound words, but sometimes it seems as if the forest is getting lost in the trees, with such heavy emphasis on the individual characters over the words they are part of. Or is this simply caused by my poor results when studying the individual characters when compared to my better results with the words? I guess in the end it's probably just an "are we there yet" mentality on my part - I want to move on when I may not be truly ready to.

FatDragon, thanks :-) She's a real sweet girl!

I can empathize with what you wrote. That does sound frustrating. I found a way around this problem, though. I use a separate SRS, Mnemosyne, for individual characters. The format is something akin to Khatzumoto's lazy kanji format:

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/lazy-kanji-cards-a-new-srs-card-format

And it looks like this...

Q: 软

A: ruǎn（1）物体内部的组织疏松，受外力作用后，容易改变形状（跟‘硬’相对）：柔～｜～木｜柳条很～。（2）柔和：～风｜～语｜话说得很～。（3）软弱：两腿发｜欺～怕硬。（4）能力弱；质量差：工夫～｜货色～。（5）容易被感动或动摇：心～｜耳朵～。（6）姓。

Upon seeing Q, the goal is to write out the character once or more times, pronounce it out loud, and think about the meaning. The goal isn't memorization, like with Skritter. No pass/fail. I grade on familiarity instead, on how comfortable I am with a character, how soon I want to see it again.

The card answers are taken verbatim from 现代汉语词典 or other dictionaries.

FatDragon, the words come up as often as they need to according to the target retention rate. The characters in fact will come up less often if there's just one word you're getting them wrong in, so you must be missing them in multiple words if you're seeing that pattern. (Unless the words are longer ones.)