Hi!

Recent threads made me understand that Skritter treats single-character words very differently from multi-character words. And apparently there is no difference at all between a single-character word added to a list and a single character that only happens to appear in a multi-character word.

I would say it's very confusing and counter-intuitive. How about simplifying it? In the real world you care only about words. You are going to write down a word, and either you remember it or you don't. It really doesn't matter if the word has one or more characters. It doesn't help if the word is a single character that you can write perfectly as a part of another word. You may still forget that it is the word you want.

Wouldn't it be easier if there was only one "forgot/so-so/got it/too easy" button, after writing the whole word? And if we treated single-character words in exactly same way as multi-character words?

I'm not sure if it is doable with the current architecture, but it would be definitely easier to use and understand, and it would make Skritter test exactly what is needed it the real world: writing actual words.

The button you're talking about is the one beside the characters on the prompt. You can click it to cycle through forgot/so-so etc for the word itself.

What I'm proposing is to have ONLY this button. In other words, that Skritter should only pay attention if the user got the words right (no matter if they are single- or multi-character). That would simplify the user interface, and would make single character handling easier to understand. Now it's quite confusing:
http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=78003387&comments=9
http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=75514146&comments=4

I think that the software to take that alternate path is not Skritter. There are certainly advantages to both approaches, but doing reviews for individual characters while you're doing reviews in words is very deep into Skritter at this point. While it might be simpler the other way, we think it's more powerful and more efficient this way--you don't have to do as many reviews of easy characters you already know, and you can more quickly focus in on those characters that you don't know.

It's not perfect, but the way we're planning on going from here is to make Skritter smarter about guessing when you've forgotten the word rather than the character.