More and more as I increase my characters learned, I get words I don't know made entirely with characters I know. When these words come up (they typically introduce as writing + tones), I'm never sure how to grade them to indicate that I know the characters but not the word. My default has been to grade the characters as threes and fours and then the overall writing grade at the end to a more appropriate score. Does this do what I want, or is it damaging my learned stats for those individual characters?

I went over this with Nick a while back and this seems to be the recommended approach. I don't understand the algorithm though.

I wish there was a quick keystroke that would grade the whole word, like there is for individual characters. I typically want to grade the word as "so-so" and that takes four clicks, and additionally takes the focus away from the Flash so if I get a reading prompt next I have to click in the text box... very annoying.

James

Thanks James, that's probably what I'll stick to for now. So can I consider it confirmed that the grading button that appears once the whole word is finished applies to the word and not the individual characters?

In case there's anything more to it, I feel like a little clarification is in order, since I'm kind've anal about communicating clearly sometimes:

The issue isn't with words that I know how to write but can't define clearly (in that case, I generally just rely on the definition feature to catch it), but rather words where I'm not certain which characters make up the word. An early example would be how I used to think 决定 was written 觉定 - I knew the characters 决 and 定, but I used the wrong jue in jue ding, so I didn't want to set back the individual characters in SRS, but I did want to tell the system to give me 决定 again. It's stuff like that I'm concerned with.

I can't speak for the Skritter Gods, of course. However, I've been doing this for a while and it doesn't appear to have caused any easy characters to start popping up before schedule, not that I've noticed at least.