I talked about this before -

http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=30801067

Now I see that it is on the current poll! Please make this option available, it would be great!

I also voted YES on this. However, later I thought about it and kind of started to be afraid the speed might go out of my tone practice. They are my fastest practice right now. Perhaps it could be made customizeable with the "hide pinyin" option so we could hide/show pinyin with one option in all practice modes. Perhaps that was intended anyway.

what is tone practice? This has come up a lot recently.

Looks like the people have spoken. I'll put it on my list and we'll try it out.

This is done now; let me know how it goes.

Hi Nick,

I'm noticing the pinyin is still not hidden during the tone "portion" of writing practice. It is hidden now when I'm only being tested on tone... but when I finish writing a word, the pinyin appears after writing the character, but before I've correctly identified the tone.

Can you have this pinyin not show up until the very end?

I was worried that this would delay the association of written character to pinyin too long (an extra prompt before you can see the pronunciation), so I didn't do it that way. I don't know which is better. What do others think about that? If you're doing a combined writing + tone prompt with hidden pinyin, should the pinyin show after the writing prompt or after the tone prompt?

Well, I can't speak for others... but the tone and pronunciation are not separable in my opinion. I want to learn the tone by writing/reading the character, not by seeing or being reminded of the pinyin. This has sort of been the whole issue all along.

If a user is really concerned about "delaying the association of written character to pinyin" then they probably don't have the "hide pinyin" checkbox turned on anyway.

Living overseas, pinyin is only a tool for knowing how to pronounce a word I'm unfamiliar with... in fact, I don't want to associate a written character to pinyin at all! I want to learn the character and then know the sound that is associated with it. Seeing the pinyin slows that process down.

I didn't think I cared at all about this... tone practice was tone practice, I just had to get through it. But I have found that, after a few days of it, I am associating the tone more with the character than the pinyin - just as kohoutek writes.

(Although I still have a lot of them to learn.)

So no other opinions on whether it would be best to delay the pinyin reveal until after the tone (instead of just after the writing) in a combined writing+tone prompt? Okay, I'll put it on my list to try out and when I get it done, we'll see what people think.

Thanks man! woo!

Once again, I'm sorry to pester on about this... :) But it's really a big deal for me. I keep checking back, but it doesn't seem updated yet.

Any eta?

Many thanks.
a

Sorry man. If I give you an ETA, I will just be giving myself more pressure. I think it will be better to allocate my self-pressure toward things that affect everyone, rather than just a few. I have many uncompleted features.

That said, it's still at the top of my list, with a handful of other things. I will try to do it soon.

Related to this, I was thinking today that on tone practice I wanted the meaning hidden as well as the pinyin. I guess it would be a matter of taste though, it might be worse for some people.

Extra points for including a separate "I forgot the meaning" rating blob next to it.

Okay, I've switched things up a bit such that the tone prompts don't show the pinyin at first even when there's a writing prompt, if you have hidden reading mode on. I haven't tested to make sure it's solid in all cases, so if you notice something funny, let me know.

Just wanted to say this seems to have been working really well.

Thanks again for making the change! I've been Skrittering a lot this month and I haven't encountered any problems with it yet, and I really like that I am able to be Pinyin free now.

Thanks!

I'm digging it, too. Helps me figure out which tone goes with which tonal cousin. Thanks for hassling me!

Are you saying that there is a way for me to write the tones based on a prompt (definition) without being shown the pinyin? I think that would be useful.

Thanks,

Paul

You should already have that with hidden reading turned on--is it not working?