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The single branches, not the whole tree

bogart96   November 25th, 2012 6:18a.m.

First of all, THANK YOU !! for the update. The initial session was a bit bumpy, but clearing the iPad memory, shutting down + re-starting helped. For 1 hour I could skritter away happily on my 1 selected list. Being able to star my words and select their frequency will also improve learning efficiency. So far, so fantastic.

Now, the following has been bugging me ever since the app came out, and I wonder whether anyone else thinks it is an issue for them or not.
No matter how well I do on Skritter, meeting the kanji in real life still seems a problem for me: I do not recognise a word in a text at first glance even though I should (judging by my Skritter stats).

Investigating, I found that during Skritter sessions I focus too much on the single strokes and too little on the looks of the whole kanji.
Accordingly, I started looking away from the writing pad, instead looking at the line where the kanji will appear when I am done writing it, picturing it there in its proper shape, letting my hand do the mechanical work - just like we look at the screen and not at the keyboard when we type a text.
Now, when I mess up a new kanji or word, I look at it (in the upper line, I mean, where the finished kanji show up) and memorise it from there, and next time I remember its shape, and get it right. That works fine as long as I see the word or kanji clearly, that is: in black colour.
Sadly, when the whole word is done, the characters turn from black to red, yellow or green, and that irritates my eyes, and makes it very difficult to look at the word and shove it into my memory. It is no exception for me to finish off a 3-kanji word with all 3 colours in it :-) Of course, I can always hit the info button to see the word in black, but that slows me down.

Now, I wonder if other people hold on to each character appearing in the colour of its grading once the word is done. If not, would it be possible to dispense with the traffic lights and just leave the words in plain black?

Thank you again to the Skritter team for the good work and continuous improvements.

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