I’ve encountered a rare but recurring issue: during a stream of new words being added, Skritter will—apropos of nothing I can discern—refuse to prompt me to write a heretofore unknown character, instead quizzing me on its pinyin or tones. Correct me if I’m wrong, but generally speaking, a new character triggers a writing request by Skritter upon that word being added.
I’m not talking about, for example, a new word formed by combining two previously-learned characters. I’m used to Skritter’s mixing it up with those, perhaps checking pinyin or tones or writing.
What I’m talking about are completely new hanzi. I wrote refuse above because I’ve even tried tricking Skritter, by resetting the stats on these words that it won’t check my writing at first. Didn’t work; Skritter went straight to asking me for its pinyin or its tones instead of writing, even after it’d been reset. And that’s what puzzles me – it seems so systematic! For what it’s worth the last three words this occurred for were 习俗,习惯, and 狮子. 习 and 子 have long been a part of My Words, but the other 3 hanzi, I’d never seen before. When I’d click on the word to check its “progress,” it would say that the writing prompt is coming in 8 or 12 hours, something like that. It wouldn’t bother me if a writing prompt came shortly after the initial pinyin/reading prompt, but this is a half-day / day later …
I really do learn the hanzi better if I’m forced to write them before being quizzed re: their tones, definition, pinyin, etc. Is this a feature or a bug? It’s a relatively trivial matter but still something that perplexes me.
Incidentally, the problem has reared its head again today. This time, it happened with the words 博士生 and 硕士生. I’ve added about a couple dozen new words today, and when they included a brand new hanzi, I was prompted to write. Except for these two; the hanzi 士 and 生 are part of several other words already in My Words, but 博 and 硕 are totally new. In both cases, I was prompted for the pinyin. When I opened the word, it said the writing is due in 11 hours. As with “xi su” and “xi guan” the other day, I tried resetting the stats to see if I could force Skritter to make me write, but no, I was once again asked to input the pinyin.
It seems like a thin theory of the case, but in both instances, I’d added these pairs of words next to each other, and they both included at least one hanzi I already knew, and one hanzi I’d never seen.
update:
4 days of Skrittering later, and still haven’t been prompted to write 博士生. I’ve been asked its tones 10x and its pinyin 4x. It’s definition card says “Ready” for all four parts.
If this is normal, i.e. brand new hanzi having their pinyin & tones checked for thousands of reviews before their writing is checked, I’d like to know that, so I can stop my complaining and figure out how to deal with it. But as it stands, I can definitely feel it when 2-3 words per section lag behind the others in my learning and retaining them, because their writing is not being asked of me.
After looking at your account the behavior does not seem typical. I noticed that the list that these words are in is currently set to “review,” which could be preventing the new writings from being added. I changed the list stats to “adding” in an attempt to get the new characters to load. I’ve also adjusted the section that the list starts adding from to “Mar 30 Michael” so that it targets 碩士生 and 博士生 as new words to add right away. Please let me know if that does the trick.
Not sure how the system caught caught up in the loop, but hopefully these changes will add those word writings into your study queue!
Unfortunately, it didn’t do the trick. I’m staring right now at the definition card for 博士生 – I was just asked for its definition – and it says the next (and first) writing prompt will be due in 11 hours.
I took a look at the data, can’t figure out why it’d be doing this. The items were created in the right order, so the writing should be the first item you see for a word, unless you’re ever studying just specific parts. Whatever the reason it gets out of the order in the beginning, it seems like it keeps getting ‘spaced’ out of the way, by other items which have intervals under 12 hours. So I’ve tweaked the spacing logic so that writings don’t get spaced much if they’re new. I’ve only put this on beta, though, so try practicing from beta.skritter.com and see if that fixes the problem. If it does, I’ll send it to the main site as well.
I will give beta skritter a try, and let you know how it goes. Thank you!
I do find it curious that of the four most recent examples of this – bo2xue2sheng1, shuo4xue2sheng2, xi2su2, xi2guan4 – it was words which were added to My Words at appx the same time, with the same already-known hanzi. They were added to My Words along with dozens and dozens of other words that fit the same pattern – one or two or three already-known hanzi along with an unknown one – yet were delivered with a writing prompt. Mysterious!
@scott, unfortunately I’m given this message upon trying to open the beta version on my mainland China internet:
Looks like the Great Firewall or something like it is preventing you from
completely loading www.skritter.com because it is hosted on Google App Engine,
which is periodically blocked. Try instead our mirror:
@scott, I’ve managed to use Beta Skritter for a couple days now. The same problem as before continues to surface. For example 吉隆坡 and 西雅图 came up, both have two hanzi I already know and one I’ve never seen. Instead of being prompted to write these words, I’m asked for the reading or pinyin first.
However, it does seem your tweaking has improved the problem – instead of the “Ready: 12 hours” now it says the Writing prompt will come in less than an hour. Still strange and mildly frustrating to get hit with the pinying/reading before writing … but, this is better than before.