I was practicing writing on Skritter just now, and as I was in the middle of drawing a character I got an email that I went to read.
After I read and dealt with the email, I returned to Skritter and continued exactly where I left off (in the middle of writing 通） . I consider 通 to be an easy character to write, but when I got back to Skritter and looked at the pinyin/English of what I was writing and saw that half of the character had been written , I got the next stoke wrong.
My suggestion is for us to have a "game mode" Skritter , in which sometimes characters are already partially written out and we have to complete them. I think this will force us to think in more then one dimension and will help those who are decent at writing to push characters deeper into our memories and have a clearer recollection of them.
It would kind of be like playing on one of the tough levels of Tetris, where the round starts off with everything in kind of a mess and you have to play your way out of it.

I don't know how pheaseable something like this would be

I don't have the exact words to explain exactly why but I think it's a bad idea (although it could be fun indeed). I think it has to do with the way our brain is memorizing characters, It's like a "gesture" memory, when I start to write a character, my hand keeps writing, I don't really "remember" what is the left part of 離 when I write it, it's automatic.

Breaking this "gesture" would create more confusion I guess.

What do you think?

I feel like partial character recall would be fairly useless - learning the component parts is one thing, but learning how to pick up in the middle of a character doesn't have much real-world application, so I don't think it would be very useful.

I think it probably depends on the individual. Memories work in different ways, so for some it might be helpful. I don't think I'd use it myself, but if it's fairly simple to code then there'd be no harm in having it as an option.

By the way, Bohan, have you tried raw squigs?

Rachael.

This could be made to ease people into learning complex characters. That is, suppose the character has 12 strokes. First Skritter shows the first 11, then prompts you to draw the last stroke. Then it shows the first 10 and prompts for the last 2, etc. Finally you can draw the character from scratch.

James

One of the things I try to do when I study is to link related characters together and to try and "get" the connections. Like linking together several characters with the same root.

Would be fun if the system could have a feature that can sort my revision vocabulary into "strips" of these type of related characters and so they appear one after another. Then I could turn this on or off depending on the type of study I'm doing.

Does anyone have a different method of learning?