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The last Stroke

itaju   June 8th, 2011 5:04a.m.

Hey dear fellow Skritterers!

Well there has been one problem regarding the last strroke of the characters.

Let's say you want to practise 今 . it's a nice 4 stroke character. But after you do the last stroke Skritter automatically tells you you are right and goes on to the next.
But now let's say we are also practising 令. This radical is almost the same. You are just having one additional stroke at the end.

But what happens if you mistake these both? Let's say you are practising 今天. You know just that the first character has to be 今 or 令 (so you know at least 4 strokes right, but you are not sure of the last one). Let's assume u think it's the 5-stroke 令 version. After you write the 4th stroke Skritter will tell you, you are right (but in your head you weren't).
Other example: you are practising 令人 . Before you start writing you think the first character is 今. You make the first 4 strokes and are expecting that you are right but nothing happens. There has still something yet to be done. You remember that there is a 5 stroke character around which is similar and add the 5th stroke. You are right in both cases, even if you are obvious wrong.

This happens to alot characters.
See this:
钢琴

but it doesn't have to be only about the 今 and 令 characters. It could also happen to something like 小 and 少 . (I think there are more examples which just don't come to my mind).

So can you do something about this???

qiaodan   June 8th, 2011 5:21a.m.

I think you are right Skritter help us on the last stroke, it should not help us but ask us when we think the character is complete, for example adding an imput for submit our final choice.

FatDragon   June 8th, 2011 8:16a.m.

Most people who have been studying here for a while end up self-grading stuff like that. True, it's not ideal how it is, but it would be hard to improve the system for these characters without clunking it up for everything else. For example, if you had to tell Skritter every time you finished a character, that would add up to a lot of extra clicks and a lot of extra time.

If you feel like you would have written the wrong character if you hadn't been stopped, perhaps you could mark the character wrong or so-so on your own.

joshwhitson13   June 8th, 2011 8:49a.m.

When that happens to me I'll either give myself a 1 or a 2 and move on to the next character. Unfortunately until the day Skritter can read our minds that's probably the best way to deal with it! I actually find the self-grading buttons quite useful.

Antimacassar   June 8th, 2011 9:37a.m.

Seems a good idea to me. The problem with self-grading is that it is not objective. Or as House would say "everybody lies".

To minimize the clicking you could just have it so that when you think you have finished drawing the character you press space or click to go on to the next one and if it goes on without doing anything then you could assume that you got it right.

joshwhitson13   June 8th, 2011 2:33p.m.

I think the problem is that it automatically tells you you're done by lighting up and showing the grading buttons.

itaju   June 8th, 2011 3:30p.m.

I think an option would be that you can choose on certain characters (like the one mentioned abover) if you want to manually press space or something when you think you're finished. All other characters would be studied in the usual way. and everytime you get one of your "marked" characters it would be saying something like "be careful of your last stroke" and then you know you will have to do that space bar thing

nick   June 12th, 2011 4:14p.m.

I see a big efficiency loss if you do it for all characters. Doing it only for some characters could possibly work, but faces two problems: it's not consistent, which could prove confusing for those characters, and it's extra work and possibly another option in the preferences somewhere or an extra interface element for marking them.

So I'm not too interested in trying to solve the problem. Self-grading if you were going to write more is similar to self-marking when you are done, it seems.

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