This topic is solely dealing with expanding upon the current "hide pinyin" option to allow for more listening practice. I've been going back and forth with hiding pinyin and not. The amount of words I have is making the distinction between them by only the definition extremely difficult.

My suggestion (for writing practice only):
Add an option to only show the pinyin if an audio file isn't available for the entire word (or sometimes phrase). If there is an audio file availabe it should hide the pinyin, but immediately play the audio. If you don't catch it the first time, then you could hit the 'A' key and if you really can't catch it then as a last resort click the show button.

I feel like showing the pinyin on items that have an audio files is a waste of potential learning. Recognising words and characters based on the pinyin is a fairly useless skill to have. Well, unless you live in a country where there SMS system doesn't allow unicode and you have no choice (*cough cough* the USA).

Right now you can just enable hide pinyin and click the 'A" key each time, but I find this tedious. If there is no audio for the word you're stuck with only hearing the first character or clicking the show button. Nick mentioned that the audio can be unreliable at times, but I feel the audio messing up is far being a common problem. In rare cases where an audio file that is available but doesn't play comes up, then it would be easy to just click the show button for that item.

This solution would focus on listening rather than reading pinyin. It would be intelligent enough to recognize if an audio file was available or not and whether or not to show the pinyin. It would reduce the amount of clicking 'A' key and 'show' button to reproduce this learning style

What do you think?

what is it you want exactly? can you say in short?

My suggestion (for writing practice only):
Add an option to only show the pinyin if an audio file isn't available for the entire word (or sometimes phrase). If there is an audio file availabe it should hide the pinyin, but immediately play the audio.

I'll second that.

Great idea!