I don't know what most of us use: mouse or writing pad, but I use only the mouse as a way to put in characters. Currently I am in China and I did only bring a netbook computer with me which is just a touch too slow to work on comfortably with the Skritter flash interface. So, I find I lose a lot of time writing for the umpteenth time characters like 公，怎，好，etc, just because they occur in words of 2 or more characters. It would be handy if there would be a 'I know this character' button, so that I could concentrate on the characters that I really need to get familiar with. Any chance of seeing this included? Or will all this needless repetition go away with a better scheduling routine, i.e. one that takes into account the individual characters even if they occur in a compound.

Marc

If you just click on the rightmost button below the practice screen (the blue arrow) it marks it as known/correct and proceeds to the next one. This works for both character and tone.

Oops...didn't know that. Silly really. Thanks.

There are also 1-4 grading options available in the new version of the Flash. So if you don't want to actually write a prompt, you can just hit a number to show how well you know it and go to the next one, super-fast-like.

We are planning to do some clever scheduling such that you don't have to practice well-known characters in words when we think you do know which character it is in the word. That will be a while longer, though. Should save a lot of time!

p.s. you can also hit the spacebar (with your left hand if you are mouse-ing with your right). Just don't click it too many times :)

Auto-skip function sounds good. I always get annoyed when I come up on a character I know and miss it because I didn't know the word had that character. How exactly does that count in the stats?

Also, maybe well-known characters could be drilled once in a blue moon? Right now I hand-write characters a lot, but when I go home I won't do any handwriting other than maybe occasional calligraphy practice. I'd like to have skritter as a maintainance tool.

Currently, Skritter thinks you got both wrong, but you probably won't see the character on its own before the word unless you're getting it wrong in multiple characters. So it's not too important.

The new version will do some clever figuring to determine when it was the word that you didn't know and when it was the character. You'll also be able to override it if you really need to.

The spaced repetition is intended to take care of maintaining your knowledge. It's not 100%, but if the algorithm behaves correctly, you should remember 95% of all of those characters, even when their interval is at three blue moons.

I've had a similar issue - I got the tone for "yi" (one) wrong in some new words due to tone change rules and not knowing the tones for the following character. Skritter then had me practice "ye" on its own. I felt quite embarrassed (though of course until I posted it here nobody knew!)

Hmm, I thought I had special case logic for 一 and 不 such that you effectively couldn't get them wrong--the scheduling would just act as if you had gotten them right, since everyone knows their tones but sandhi is all whack. Maybe it wasn't working. It should be working in the new version, though.

Darned sandhi.

Chinese character is really hard to write.when you find the doohickey of it.you will be good at it soon.