I'm having a terrible time remembering that certain characters have more than one pronunciation. I think this is mainly because I made the mistake of only using the most common pronunciation when first learning the character, and only know since switching to Skritter am I starting to test myself on all pronunciations.

D you think it would be a good idea to have Skritter indicate, in the adding test, the number of pronunciations there are for a character (if therer are more than one)? This is similar to how it shows a line for the number of characters contained in a word.

Or should I just keep plowing away at memorizing which characters have more than one pronunciation?

Or any other suggestions in handling this?

Learning the words that contain the alternate pronunciations can be a huge help, e.g. the 重 (zhòng/chóng​) in 保重 (bǎo​zhòng) and 重复 (chóng​fù). That's how I tackle it.

It does that already in a way, or it should. If you look at the blank reading in the prompt area, there's a comma there separating the missing readings, when there are multiple readings.

@adamd: Great idea. I really need to start putting things in context that aren't sticking. Thanks!

@scott: Thanks Scott. I see that in the writing tests, but not in in the "What's the pinyin?" tests.

Would it be feasible for the 'what's the pinyin?' test to indicate the number of pronunciations needed for characters that have more than one pronunciation?

I see that in Japanese, each reading of a character is treated as a word separately. Would it be difficult to do that in Chinese?

@Hund: That would be really counter productive for Chinese, since there are seldom that clearcut differences between the definition of the same characters with different pronunciations, and it would be impossible to define them all in a way that makes sense.
@Lechuan: I see you are studying Heisig, and I suppose this is one of the reasons he chose not to include the readings in his book, which is strictly about characters. The pronunciations are of the words, and characters are not words. I think you are better off learning this the hard way - by making mistakes, and remember the shame you experienced when you were corrected. Pronunciation also only really becomes relevant in the context of speaking, and it is extremely difficult to remember pronunciation unless you actually hear people using it.

I think multiple pronunciations should be regarded as (rather common) exceptions to a set system of pronunciations: Learn the standard first, and then start treating yourself to the exceptions as they become relevant.

Really? I thought it was quite the opposite; that the different readings in Chinese almost always indicate different meanings, while in Japanese a character can have many readings which have the exact same meaning.

Well, sometimes it is distinctive. But even when it is, you have the problem of how to let the user know what he is supposed to be writing, without giving the answer away. Chinese people themselves, when wishing to specify which character they mean, say 睡觉的觉 ('jiao' as in 'shuijiao'), and 觉得的觉 ('jue' as in 'juede'). Context is really the only sensible way to distinguish the pronunciations.

And, besides, you are not going to need this sort of knowledge until you know a word that contains this particular variant. So practicing single character pronunciations are really not all that useful, unless, of course, we are speaking of characters that oftenmost occur on their own, but in that case we are, once again, speaking of exceptions, since the vast majority of words are compounds.
I don't think it's particularly useful to be fretting about it, you should rather just get out there and use the language, the importance of these details aren't all that pressing, and you will learn it when people start (and more importantly: wont stop) correcting you.

To quote a line from Far Cry:
"You do know how to fly a hang glider, don't you?"
"No, but I learn real fast when people are shooting at me."

Yeah, it makes sense, I guess.

Haha, yeah, people correct me in Mainland China all the time. But here in Taiwan, they only do that when they really don’t understand what I’m saying and I have to explain myself. And when they’re one of my teachers.