Does anyone know how to turn this on with the new site format? Re-reading old tips of the day, and it sounds like it would be helpful because I feel like sometimes I'm just guessing the next radical and hoping that it falls into place!

When you're in the flash portion of the site (with the writing box), in the upper corner theres a grey gear icon with settings available, and from there you can enable the 'write raw squigs'

Oh my! This is going to ABSOLUTELY change everything! Thanks!

Truthfully this isn't as dramatic a change as you might originally think. Skritter (I assume because of technical limitations) still evaluates on a stroke-by-stroke basis, so even in raw squigs mode it will still throw an error if an interim stroke is wrong. That means it's still possible to "cheat," even if it's just the sort of subconscious reassurance that the stroke you've just made didn't cause an error, so it must be right. I often find myself hesitating momentarily, thinking "does this one start with a water radical or not," then going a head and writing the first 点儿, not getting yelled at, and going ahead to write the rest of the character correctly. In a perfect world, I'd manually mark that so-so, but sometimes I don't even completely realize I'm doing it until I have to write the character in the real world on pen and paper.

The gold standard, I think, would be waiting to write the whole character, then holistically evaluating it to see if it's right, but I don't think Skritter could do that technically (anyone who actually knows, feel free to correct me, but it seems like Skritter sees characters as a sequence of strokes, and a holistic evaluation wouldn't work.)

A solution down the road might be a sort of uber raw squigs mode that disables handwriting recognition completely: just shows you the prompt, lets you doodle away until you tell it you're done, then shows you the answer and lets you manually evaluate how you did. Probably not a priority though.

dbkluck: I originally thought as you did. However, the 'gold standard' in my view is whether or not you can write the character outside skritter. Without raw squigs, many I could not, with raw squigs, I pretty much can.

Other ways of measuring whether the character is written right are either prone to mistakes (your first one), or slow (the second). Also, if the problem is you're getting the character wrong by putting in a wrong stroke (which Skritter then hints the right one), you can always mark the character wrong yourself. If I really know a character, it basically gets written straight away without help from Skritter at all, and works just like your first example. It's only if I don't entirely know the character that it hints.

I agree with dbkluck. The best way would be if you could write the whole character, without any stroke order rules etc, kind of the way you handwrite chars on nciku.com. It is actually pretty darn accurate, and almost always recognizes the character, if you dont write it extremely bad ofc.

Just tried this, and its kind of cool. On nciku.com you can actually write a whole character in one single stroke, and it still recognizes it perfectly.

@DaXia I wouldn't say "perfectly".