When I learn a new character, I often find it helpful to write it many times fast, to get the "flow" of the character. It would be really helpful, when encountering a new character or making an embarrasing mistake on a review, to be able to quickly "zoom in" on that character in some sort of quick scratchpad.

It could just have recognition for that particular character, without tone entry. When complete, the character could clear out after a split second and be ready for writing the same character again. Maybe even a counter, so I could see when I had done 20 reps or something.

It could be a modal toggle I could enable to "muscle memorize" and then toggle back to continue the normal practice.

In a similar situation, I have recently just started hitting the "erase" icon and done the character over (and over) again. I assume this does not affect the stats and the character is only counted as wrong once.

I do the erase thing too but I can't do that for words, only for characters. I find when learning characters that Skritter often puts them too far apart to learn (i.e. if I get a character wrong and have never gotten it right, I'll need to try it again quite soon if I am to have a chance of remembering it).

Yes, erase is safe in that way. The character only gets submitted for review once you go to the next prompt.

So, vlarsen, can I accurately describe the feature as wanting a way to trigger "automatic erase on character complete"? If so, it doesn't seem to me to have much advantage over using the erase button (or pressing "X") when you want to do that. In particular, writing it that many times seems like it'll be inefficient for most people, so I'm hesitant to encourage that by building a mode for it.

I havn't thought about the erase "trick"; I'll certainly try it.

It's not completely what I wanted, though. What I need is more like a fast auto-erasing mode; like the "drop and give me 20 push-ups" when-doing-something-wrong sort of forced punishment :) preferably without having to push any buttons at all...

When memorizing characters on paper, I used to do multiple repitions, such as 25 reps of 20 characters each day. Maybe it is just me, learning characters by their "rythm"; and pushing an extra button would sort of introduce an extra unvanted "beat".

So maybe that could be a refinement of the feature request? Let me choose 10-15-20 characters, and the number of reps for each, and then just complete them in auto-"erase" advance mode? That would certainly cut down on my spending on 字稿紙.

Having just tried the "erase" method, it certainly works for the "damn, I should know this character" use-case.
Would be nice to have some measure of precision, though. Like a percentage or something I could try to approach 100%/perfect while doing repetitions. I'm sure you have some kind of deviation metric somewhere in the recognition engine you could dispaly on repeted erase-complete cycles :)

The recognition isn't very precise in that respect; if we gave you the score it's using to calculate how well you drew strokes, you'd think it quite arbitrary. We'd rather encourage you to go fast. Part of that is letting the spaced repetition do its thing, such that you can draw a character ten times in total to learn it, rather than 20 times at first and then several more times each practice. You'll end up spending much longer on it if you're adding so many reps per prompt, I think.

I'm not sure. Spaced repetition seems better (to me) for remembering than for learning - until I 'get' a character (i.e. I can remember it 5 seconds later) I don't think spacing is helpful. Once I 'get' the character then it is useful to practice it using spaced recognition.

@2shanghai:

That's why I do use the erase button to write the character a few times (for me, usually try to get it right 3 times in a row without mistake), but also, as long as you keep it marked blue (unlearned), it doesn't get put off long, should keep coming back in the same session until you get it right or decide to mark it green, showing that you "got" it, and can start spacing it out more.