Until today when I typed pinyin, Skritter would show me the answer and mark mine right or wrong. Today it's correcting my answers when I hit "show" and marking everything as correct.

I saw this, too, although I hadn't thought of it as a bug. To avoid using the keyboard I don't type the pinyin but simply use the "show" button and then adjust the grading appropriately. Before the initial grade was "wrong/forgot" and just now I was surprised to see skritter assuming I was right, how nice!

It doesn't make much difference to me, although I appreciate the positive feedback, but I can see that having your answers corrected might not be best if you want a second chance at getting the pinyin correct yourself.

I'll be working on this to make it work a little smarter. I just made a change to it to allow for better studying as flashcards without typing.

I think it will work better for now if you press enter after you type it, rather than clicking the show button.

Hi nick, I think the changes are an improvement, thanks, but there's one problem with putting the pronunciation in the input field when I do "show": I can't use the keyboard shortcuts for self-grading readings anymore.

I used to be able to type "up-arrow" to show, then use 1-4 (or 6-9 since your fix) for self-grading, because digits are interpreted as self-grading when the field is empty. But now that the field is filled-in with text, I can't self-grade: my self-grade is interpreted as a tone. So there's no way to self-grade using the keyboard (to give a 2, for example) except by backspacing to erase the whole input field, then hitting the digit key in the empty input field.

I don't get what is gained by having the system enter the text in the input field, since the system already shows the correct pronunciation immediately below the input field. When I do "show" for writing, the system doesn't write the character for me.

OK back to my backlog of 2000+ reviews...

Okay, thanks for letting me know. I'll work on this soon when I fix the other bugs I created with it.

great! I should say the keyboard shortcuts are already working pretty well for me to zip through my reviews.

I mostly use:
↑→ (show, next)
↑1 or ↑2 (if I get it wrong)

For readings that I get wrong:
↑↓→
(due to above-mentioned problem)

For writings and tones:*
↑↓→ (show, correct, next)
↑→ (if I get it wrong)
(though of course I usually use the tablet for writing, not keys)

The shorter I can make the above list of key sequences, the faster I can zip through reviews.

*For writings I could also self-grade using
↑1 ↑2 ↑3
but I don't use that since I can't use the same technique for tones
(is there even a way using the mouse to give a tone review a 2 self-grade?)

I think I've fixed all the problems that my recent "fix" created, and it should work better to using the pinyin prompts as flashcards now.

To grade a tone with a 2, you can click the grading indicator in the prompt to cycle through the 1-4 grades. This only works on the word-level item; there's no way to give one character in a word a tone grade of 2. Apart from the key conflict and grading/tone buttons conflict, we figured this is actually a feature, as we don't want to encourage people to spend time thinking about grading tones--just do them really fast, and it'll be more efficient than trying to manually grade them.

yup it works much better, thanks!

I don't really care about fine-tuning my grading of tones or anything else, but I do wish I could use the same method for all. Using self-grading I almost can, just not for tones.

If I could self-grade tones, then for every kind of review I could just use:

↑1 or ↑3 (↑2 or ↑4 are less necessary, but nice to have)

very simple!

As it is, I currently use:

for readings and definitions:

↑→ (correct)
↑1 or ↑2 (wrong)

for writings and tones (if for some reason I'm not using the tablet):

↑↓→ (correct)
↑→ (wrong)

which is already pretty simple, and really speeds me along.

I forget, did you a while ago mention a way that I could do all the readings and definitions together, and then all the writings and tones? That might speed me even more by reducing the number of times when I switch from keyboard to tablet.

Yeah, you just use the temporary parts study feature in the gear on the study page. You can do writings by themselves, or readings by themselves, or group writings with tones and readings with definitions. If you do that, it's good to do readings before tones, since a lot of tones will get practiced inside the readings anyway.

thanks, I'll try that

nick, another small suggestion to make pinyin mode more like the others, but this time when using the pen or mouse, hope you like it :-) :

for definitions, I click anywhere in the main zone (delimited by the green square) to display the answer "(click to show definition)", then I click again to move to the next item.

but for readings, to display the answer I have to click below the green square ("show" button), and to move forward I have to click on the "next" button.

it would be easier and more consistent if for readings I could click anywhere* inside the zone to show, then click again anywhere in the zone to move forward.

that way for all items I could keep the pen inside the zone.

*except the text input field, of course

Good point. It's a bit of an issue with the way the code is set up with the focus and the text input field which makes it more work than one would think. I will put it on the list, but I don't think I'll get to it any time soon.