I just enabled "hide pinyin" as an experiment and I'm not sure it's working as planned. If I study a multi-character word (which is most of the time) it hides the pinyin for the first character, but then shows it when it shows the second character. Was this on purpose? I would have imagined it would hide the pinyin for all the characters.

James

That's how it works. Nick was thinking about doing each character individually... But after using it for so long, I don't feel it really matters. In fact, it's probably better this way as I have to really think about the whole word first, and not stumble my way through...

Hmmm, what is it that makes you think about the whole word? The way I see it, I get the definition prompt with "show pinyin". I write the first character, and then the pinyin appears. That means that if you get the first character right, you get the pinyin hints for all the subsequent characters, which makes them easier. Why is that better than showing them one by one?

You're not talking about reading practice, are you?

James

Nope - talking about writing.

As far as I'm concerned, both ways are fine.

Currently when a word comes up, I stop, try to think of the word (the whole pinyin/pronunciation) then write it. For the most part the whole word will come to me, not just the first character (although, occasionally... - then I mark it the word wrong). So, for me, it's not a case of remembering the first one, and then having the rest of the pinyin revealed to me.

My thought was - if it did reveal one by one, would I try to write the first character, and if that succeeds then figure out the rest of the word by proxy. This is more akin to how I write some characters, -- putting down a few strokes and then the rest comes to me (this is not always intentional, and is why my real life character writing is not quite as good as my skritter character writing).

Still, with foresight and being strict on myself, I think revealing characters one by one would be fine too.

It's just not an issue for me!

Yeah, but there's nothing about the current system that *forces* you to think of the whole word first, and in fact revealing the pinyin early gives you more hints than revealing them one by one would. Revealing them one by one would make it *more* difficult to figure things out one character at a time.

From a purely learning perspective, figuring out the English translation character by character rather than it come to you instantly doesn't sound up to much.

As for Skritter, whatever suits..

edit: figuring out from* the English translation

I'm definitely in agreement with JWW on this one, to me it should keep the pinyin hidden the entire time, and if you need to take a peek you can click the reveal pinyin button. I personally just try not to look over there after I write the first character but it would be nice not to always avert my eyes. As Byzanti says ideally you'd put pressure on yourself to think of the entire word first - but in the real world, at least with me, that's not always the case.

I gotta agree with JWW on this one. This was the conversation way back in the day:

http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=20717207&comments=9

It seems like there are two basic ways people remember - whole words at once or piece-mail. I definitely agree with you that "Revealing them one by one would make it *more* difficult to figure things out one character at a time."

if it matters, I also do not like that pinyin is revealed at second character. I also try not look there. I vote against it.

I suggested this to Nick a little while ago and he said:

"Yeah, I still gotta fix the pinyn-less practice to be granular instead of all-at-once. I think it'll just show one character at a time even if you get it wrong or click, but you'll be able to click on the other characters' hidden bubbles to see them."

(I'm assuming it's ok for me to share this, I don't think it's top secret!)

I'm with the show pinyin one character at a time camp. It is often the case for me that I remember one of the characters in a word much better than the others (especially if it is used in several words I know). If it happens to be the first one and pinyin then shows for the remaining characters it is much easier to "cheat" and glance at the now-revealed pinyin for a hint on the rest of the word than it would be if pinyin were revealed only for characters already written.

Yeah I think that's how I'd program it - just let the user click on any of the as of yet unwritten pinyin spaces/bubbles if you want a hint for the pinyin for that character. An option that I would like to see would be to have getting these hints count against the "learned" value for the word, as I like to test myself on the definition and writing all in one single step. As it stands right now, if I know how to write a word but wasn't able to think of the word from the definition, I just have to find a character to intentionally mark as incorrect to reflect that mistake. Anyone else do that?

Two other thoughts. Even if using individual sections which I'm happy with, a 'show all' button would be nice. It would be a pain to have a new 4-5 character phrase and have to click each segment (4-5 clicks) because I've forgotten it each time.

As for auto-marking wrong... I'm not keen. User should decide themselves. Two situations. 1. I almost always click individual character 'show pinyin' before I start writing as the definitions are too common to do otherwise. 2. If a word has a similar definition to another word (a lot more often than you think), I cycle the correct variants in my head, then click the show pinyin button so I know which one to write. In both cases, since I get more right than I do wrong, auto marking incorrect would be more unhelpful than helpful.

> If a word has a similar definition to another word (a lot more often than you think.

This makes sense. It really happens all the time, like for example Skritter asks for friend, and then you need guess, whether it's 友 or 朋 in this case expected to be written

Ahh, good thinking Byzanti, that does happen often to me as well.

What I mentioned about was never meant to infer "auto-marking wrong", however - I just thought it would be cool to have a second "wrong" button for the definition, or the entire word, as opposed to only being able to mark individual characters as being "wrong", since in some cases I can write all of the characters to a word, say 五彩繽紛, but I might not have been able to recall that actual chengyu from the definition. Basically I'm trying to combine all of the tests into one question format. (Actually I like to use Chinese definitions where possible for that extra layer of understanding.)

I have really enjoyed the extra practice/challenge that the hidden pinyin gives, but like some others have found that the commonality in definitions means that I often have to guess which word it is referring to. Even if the revealing of the pinyin for the first character would help prompt that, I don't feel I personally would benefit hugely from separately revealing the characters. If I am learning that word, I am learning it as a whole. I either do or do not know it as a unit.
Of course, for those who are concerned about their statistics, I'm not sure what effect that has. Ultimately, I think that all of us are trying to learn Chinese well and so we know whether we know it or not. When I honestly use the buttons and grade it, I think it all works nicely for my learning.

I'm with those of you that think seeing the pinyin is necessary at times for disambiguating the many shared-meaning words. All at once is fine with me because I still can test myself and I generally know it as a phrase/word or not at all.

As for the grading, drvelocity asks:
"As it stands right now, if I know how to write a word but wasn't able to think of the word from the definition, I just have to find a character to intentionally mark as incorrect to reflect that mistake. Anyone else do that?"

I believe there are grades for individual characters as well as a word/phrase grade. Those individual ones are controlled after writing a character and, nmost easily, modified inside the writing window (click right/wrong or use the grading buttons) - I use those to reflect whether I am able to actually write the things. However, there is also a word/phrase grade displayed to the right of the characters shown ouside the flash window after the writing is complete. That's what I modify to reflect whether I knew the word/phrase based on the definition as opposed to knowing how to write the character components.

It definitely can't mark it wrong if the user shows the pinyin, there are too many ambiguous definitions. In my vocabulary, for example, I have two words for "orange", 橙子 and 橘子. Unless we change the definitions so they're unique (maybe the second one should be "tangerine") you need the pinyin to decide which one to write.

James

To be clear, let me reiterate that I'm not suggesting that anything gets marked wrong automatically when showing the pinyin, obviously that would be extremely confusing.

Wow, Sarac I believe you found exactly what I wanted - thanks!! I had no idea you could toggle that, great!

As mentioned, I am planning on bubblizing each of the syllables separately. I think I will try it without a show-all button at first to see if we really need one of those. And as pointed out, marking wrong on showing of pinyin won't work because of ambiguities.

I've got a bunch of other things before I fix it up, but it'll come. Thanks for the patience.

@nick - works great, thanks!

I'm also a big fan of the last bubble revealing the lot :).

You know it! The one thing I haven't accounted for is keeping the extra bubbles open where you reveal everything. So if you reveal all three bubbles on the first character, then on the second character the last two bubbles will come back. I'm hoping to get away without logic for that.