Hey guys,

It's been fantastic watching you develop the site over the last year or so, and for the most part I think you have absolutely met the "suck less" criteria: http://blog.skritter.com/2009/08/styling-ch-ch-changes.html

However, one of the saddest developments for me was changing it "so that the audio doesn't play if the pinyin is hidden, so as not to give it away."
http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=20778915

I could see where you were coming from then, it was kind of screwy trying to integrate it with the tone prompts, however i really would love to see this feature back. I've already been surprised at how much practicing with skritter has helped my audio comprehension-I'll hear a word and be able to see it in skritter and know what it means even though i don't feel like I'm paying that much attention to the audio as I practice. If it could be tweaked to require paying attention to the audio i would love it.

Especially now with the writing of pinyin and tones, I would love to be able to turn off tone only practice (somewhat redundant now) and get all the writing prompts as is + the automatic reading of the audio (when audio is available). I know I can click the sound button, but it just isn't practical to do for every prompt. I'd rather associate the writing with the sound rather than just the imprecise english definition.

I doubt everyone would want this, and I suspect you don't want to have to support to many different modes of practice, but it seems like a relatively minor tweak that could be buried in an "advanced" tab so as not to confuse beginners.

The other huge advantage to this that I see is that it would easily lend itself to implementing Khatzumoto style sentence practice - hear the audio and write the sentence (or know the definition).
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack

I know chinesepod has a huge database of sentence text and audio... Maybe with every word you study skritter could suggest one or two sentences from the database with that word in it to add to sentence practice...

Sorry for the long post! Just something I've been thinking about.

""However, one of the saddest developments for me was changing it "so that the audio doesn't play if the pinyin is hidden, so as not to give it away."
http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=20778915""

Where as for me it pretty much changed Skritter from being fairly useless past a certain point to being absolutely brilliant. Once I learnt lots of characters, the problem was remembering the words themselves - their particular character combinations. I can't stress how helpful it is, with only the English prompt and no audio to remembering these. If this option was taken away, I'd prompto be on a flight to Oberlin knocking irately on Skritter HQ's door ;p.

Still, I'm all for giving people options, even though too many does make things cluttered. Your idea of an advanced tab sounds like a top idea.

As for hearing then writing/defining long sentences - like it. Might sound a bit dodgy if they're having to string different sounds together though. Currently I use anki for sentences (one half of the flash card is in English, the other in Hanzi and vice versa), except there's no auto audio. Still, it does the job good enough for me.

On the example sentence thing, I think they're on to that. Would love to see it.

Anyway. Some good ideas, but damned if you're taking the only pinyin/no audio prompt from me!

Hmm, that's a good point Byzanti, I think the difference for me is that right now I am more focused/interested in working on comprehension (listening/reading) so I want to work on making that association between the sound pattern and the meaning as instinctive and quick as possible.

If you want to be able to produce (write/speak) then it seems like it would be much more helpful the way it is now.

That's why options are great! (hint, hint, nudge, nudge)

I'd agree it'd be a bit dodgy if the sentences were just character sounds pasted together, but chinesepod has a huge collection of full sentence audio.

The tweak suggested is relatively minor, but also not broadly useful. I can think of a way this would be better: if there were broader support for a "hearing the sound is not equivalent to seeing the pinyin" mode. We'd intend that for newer learners, so that they could get practice reproducing pinyin from the audio, and it'd affect all prompt types. But until we have made something like that, I'll leave the option off.

Or, we could do a more specialized audio prompt setup for sentences, but I think that'll be way far off, given the amount of work it'll take to do sentence practice right. I am a fan of sentence practice, though.

Fair enough, it's your baby. Welcome back

@nick It would be pretty useful to have a "dictation" mode like you're describing; we could learn to identify the tones and pinyin from audio only. FSI Chinese does that in the initial lessons and it's quite useful.

For me, I would really love a "speak the chinese in correct tones" mode. Rosetta Stone has that, you have to pronounce it and you can even see how high your tones were and where they should be. The software then decides whether you were close enough or on with you being able to configure its sensitivity.

I imagine coding it would be a real challenge, but perhaps there is code or a library or something out there on the internet that allows for such things.

Any chance of that going to happen? That would be really cool.

I've been dreaming about spoken tone recognition for tone input for a while. I don't think it will be that hard. It might make a great intern project!

We have to wait for Flash Player 10.1 to start on it, because the mic API will let us access the raw data there.