If I were to uncheck "Also Add Characters When Adding Words" to get ahead on vocabulary and neglect learning single character definitions for the time being, and then went back and rechecked the box later; would all the words' characters be added suddenly or would they be stuck in limbo land never to get individually added?

The latter. You would need to add them individually.

Might I ask why you would want to study characters in isolation? It seems to me that words are much more useful.

James

In fact, one of the wonderful hidden powers of Skritter is the learning of isolated characters as a starting point for enlarging the vocabulary.

For instance, yesterday I was learning the character meaning "instrument" qi4.

When I opened the "enlarging lens" for this character I found 4 very useful words, "weapon", "electric appliance", "robot", "machine".

Yes, exactly. Why not study those words instead of 器?

I was thinking of adding words without adding single characters. Right now I am learning both and so I have to learn the definition of single characters that exist inside words as well. This has pros and cons as I have no concept or experience to tie to the character. It is simply memorization. Words come from vocab lists or conversations and so are practical. In the end I'd like to know the meaning every character though. For instance, when I learn 西藏 I find it somewhat meaningless to memorize 藏‘s meaning at this point as it doesn't relate to my knowledge or level. Later when I get up to 隱藏, which I'm not at yet, then learning 藏's meaning may be worth it.

Jww, do you only study the words and just casually look at the character's meanings as you study them instead of studying both and thus somewhat doubling up?

Yeah, I'm currently in the process of deleting all of my single characters from study. They take a tremendous amount of time which I think would be better spent learning words.

I say this for two reasons. One, you need to learn words anyway; even if you could somehow quickly memorize the fact that 当　means

1. should
2. in front of
3. act as
4. deserve
5. be in charge
6. match
7. chime
8. knock

(according to nciku) you would still need to somehow learn when the meaning changes based on context, and I don't see how that can be done without studying words or phrases. Second, I think learning words is actually a lot easier than learning individual characters, because they're less ambiguous; two- and three-character words generally have only one or two meanings, and usually have only one reading.

James

I feel adding characters individually increases my proficiency at written Chinese, which is mainly why I use Skritter. I feel it also allows me to more quickly absorb and learn new vocabulary.

I frequently run into new spoken words and from my knowledge of characters can piece together two similarly defined characters that form that word. This really seems to throw Chinese people for a loop as I'm able to logically narrow down characters based on the spoken pinyin then write the correct ones without ever having studied the actual word. I think I'd be less able to do this if I didn't have some of the rather ambiguous single character definitions in my mind.

I completely agree with both of you.

That said, if I want to reach a higher level of Chinese faster I am thinking it be best to study only the word now and take note of the characters meaning. Its hard when I have to memorize a new list of vocab with 20 new words and 8 new characters and I get the new words down before I can memorize the characters ambiguous meanings that sometimes don't seem to relate to the word's meaning.

I think its all about goals. For me, I prefer to have an excellent command of thousands of Chinese words before I master the meaning of a character that shows up only in one or two words and seems unrelated to their meaning. In the end I want this knowledge but its not practical at an intermediate level. Taiwanese friends often tell me, "that has no meaning" (which it really does) when I come across new characters. The point is, they are fluent and have no need for that knowledge on a perfectly fluent level. So, its just one more thing I'll delay in order to make my learning more streamlined.

@孟志书, see what works for you. But I would bet that, for most people, it's easier and faster to learn a bunch of compound words using 干 than to memorize its definition, which Skritter gives as

to work; do; manage; tree trunk, to concern; shield; dry; clean

I'm not saying we shouldn't learn lots of characters. I'm saying that studying them in isolation might not be the most efficient way to learn them.

James - 当 and 干 are pretty bad examples I think, they are both used very commonly as single character words and surely people should know how to use them?

@Neil - I agree. The Skritter definitions, though, don't really help in that case as they don't tell you whether 他当老师 means "he works as a teacher" or "he's in front of the teacher" or even "he knocks on the teacher". (Note that I made up this example so it might not be correct/idiomatic.)

The value of learning single character definitions is certainly debatable, but what about the writings, readings, and tones? I think those are valuable to study on their own.

If you study them in context, you still end up learning all those things, but the extra context helps to disambiguate similar cases. Take readings for example: characters with multiple readings become much simpler when they're in words, because they generally have only one reading if you ignore the whole optional-neutral-tone thing.

@jww1066 I agree that many single character definitions are too ambiguous to memorize. Like Nick said the pinyin, writing and tones practice are definitely valuable isolated practice. To be honest, I don't grade single character definitions strictly at all. I remember someone a long while ago saying if they can recall one piece of the definition or a word that the character belongs to they'll mark it right.

Actually on single character definitions I highly recommend trying to think of as many words it's contained in. I find this an interesting and backwards way of testing my recognition of things.

哎呀, reading this good discussion and agreeing with everyone... Now I really don't know what to do! ;-)

怎么办。。。

But 孟志书's last point is good, just grade single character definitions less strict (when you feel like it), and then it's still very valuable to learn the pinyin, writing and tones.

@@

OK, changed my opinion once more after reading this thread:
http://www.skritter.cn/forum/topic?id=90571003

Thanks guys!:)