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子 as three strokes

葛修远   May 20th, 2011 10:57a.m.

Is it really necessary to have the system accept 子 in three strokes? (i.e. 乛, 亅, 一).

I use raw squigs and it's quite annoying when you write the 了 part in one go but it's registered as 乛. You either don't realise and re-try the 一, or if you do realise you end up with a mess by doubling up the 亅.

I don't really see why you'd want to write the 乛 and 亅 separately, so could the system just require 了 in one go? That should be faster and less error-prone.

jww1066   May 20th, 2011 11:06a.m.
葛修远   May 20th, 2011 11:51a.m.

Sure, but you can write it with two and I'd imagine most people do.

joshwhitson13   May 20th, 2011 11:58a.m.

When I'm writing 子 by hand I also do the 了 in one go, but never really had a problem with the "proper" way when I'm on Skritter.

My Chinese teachers always write 不 with three strokes instead of four (combining the first two strokes) so I've picked up that habit as well, but when it comes to Skrittering I figure we might as well do things the proper way.

jww1066   May 20th, 2011 12:01p.m.

@葛修远 Yeah, but your question was "Is it really necessary to have the system accept 子 in three strokes?" and since that's the official way to do it, I would think the answer is yes.

James

Ekrem   May 20th, 2011 12:46p.m.

Unless I'm missing the obvious, I fail to see the real issue here as the system accepts the 了 section as one stroke or two.

Even when the 'z' key is used to undo the stroke, the system removes according to whatever style was used.

FatDragon   May 20th, 2011 12:56p.m.

@Ekrem - The issue is that sometimes you try to write 了 in one stroke and it reads it as only the top half.

I understand both sides of the argument here - I started learning to write characters out of a book that taught 子 strictly as three strokes, so that's what I got used to in the beginning, and it should definitely be supported. Now, however, I have the same issue as that OP sometimes - I try to write 了 in one go but it thinks I only wrote the top half. My response has just been "oh well" and to move on, it's hardly the only stroke issue I have on Skritter, which is about 95% great and 5% irritating stroke spamming to get those pesky strokes recognized - but if it misreads your stroke enough times, there's always self-grading.

jww1066   May 20th, 2011 1:05p.m.

FWIW, I also find the shortcut for 口 trips me up a little less than half the time. (I usually write it with three strokes, but apparently Skritter often thinks I'm trying to write it with two.)

FatDragon   May 20th, 2011 1:20p.m.

Ha, likewise - especially on the third stroke of 包 - well, not the same character, but the same stroke. It rarely causes me much trouble even when it happens though, I just roll with it.

葛修远   May 20th, 2011 1:48p.m.

Yeah it's not a huge issue, just a bit grating. I agree with the 95% / 5% good to bad balance.

itaju   May 20th, 2011 1:55p.m.

yep. everything we learn here is the official way. I don't think there will be a way of skritter having implemented all of the usual handwritings (which I have great difficulties in reading them...)

grzejnix   May 21st, 2011 4:11a.m.

offtopic: actually it could be cool to have a hand-writing reading feature in skritter so that you can learn to read handwriting too and get used to this style of writing. how about that devs? :)

nick   May 21st, 2011 8:00p.m.

I'll pay some attention to misrecognition between the two- and three-stroke versions of these two radicals when I next do some recognition tuning and see if I can't separate them better.

I don't think we will do any handwriting-style study, grzejnix--that's an entirely different handwriting recognition engine right there. It would be cool, though.

FatDragon   May 22nd, 2011 5:04a.m.

As far as learning to read Chinese people's handwriting - you'd probably be better off getting your hands on some samples of handwritten material, with typed or standard "translations" so you could compare the handwritten characters to the standard ones to see what sort of shortcuts and tricks they use. Still, handwriting in Chinese, like in other languages, varies greatly from person to person, so the benefit of that kind of study would be limited.

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