When being quizzed on a character or word, I would much prefer to enter both the meaning and the pronunciation at the same time for the following reasons:
I want to recall both the meaning and pronunciation at the same time because when I’m reading Chinese (especially dialogue), I don’t want to know the meaning without simultaneously knowing how it sounds (and vice versa).
Despite the recent UI improvements, I still frequently enter in a character/word’s meaning when prompted for its sound and vice versa, wasting time. I think this would eliminate this issue more completely.
If characters had two text boxes instead of one, then they would be visually distinct from components which would only have one text box. Despite the color change, I still frequently enter character meaning/pronunciation when prompted with a component and vice versa. I think having a different number of text boxes should help me avoid making this mistake.
One caveat with this approach is if you get a pronunciation or meaning wrong, you might need to type both again. I personally would be 100% okay with this because for me it would be outweighed by the amount of time I save no longer redoing prompts where I type the pronunciation instead of the meaning and vice versa. (I wouldn’t mind reinforcing the mnemonic of the character/word I got wrong anyway.) However, if this was a major annoyance for people, there could plausibly be an option to automatically fill in the part they already got right.
I can see the utility of being able to answer both meaning and pronunciation at the same time, since the mnemonic recall process fetches both of them into memory when answering either of those. This could be done by simply having the two questions for a given item always show up in order instead of separately and randomly.
Another thing I’ve run into lately is sometimes it’s hard to find the time to finish all my reviews in one sitting, and so there’s a risk of losing my progress when Android does power saving; perhaps this might help with that as well.
Another thing I’ve run into more lately is that, because I’m a slow typist (especially on mobile), the overhead of typing has been adding up to become a bit of a bottleneck in my studies.
Currently what I’m doing is recalling both the meaning and pronunciation when seeing a character, and then afterwards looking at the prompt (pronunciation vs. meaning) and entering the answer.
I imagine having the order always be the same (e.g. always the pronunciation followed right after by the meaning, or vice versa) could help me streamline this a bit, as I could start typing whilst recalling.
Another nice option might be to not have to type in the answers, i.e. to see a character, say the pronunciation and meaning out loud, reveal the answer, and indicate whether I got both the pronunciation and meaning exactly correct. It might make sense as an opt-in mode, as it’d be most useful for people who can grade themselves strictly, but for me it would allow me to re-invest a lot of time into lessons (which I don’t always get to), reading practice, listening practice, etc.
I also frequently put put in the character meaning when asked for a component. My solution is that I just put the character meaning as an alias if the character and component are exactly the same.
I also frequently mess up the pronunciation vs meaning for characters and words. Most of the time the program catches me and tell me to do the other one, but I still have to erase the wrong answer and put the right one. Then I have to put my answer in again when asked for the other part of the same character later on.
Having two text boxes for characters and words would be great.
Related to this topic:
Something I’ve been wanting for a while is a “skip this” button when doing reviews. Sometimes my mind is just rebelling from thinking. We all know what hard work it is learning another language! And my mind just gets tired. Or sometimes I find that I have just ONE minute to whip out as many answers as I can before I am called off to another direction (plus breaking up learning has its benefits too). If I could just push the difficult character/word back a dozen or more spaces, it would free up the words I have time or mental capacity to answer.
We have now added the option to enter meaning and pronunciation at the same time when doing reviews. It is a new advanced setting and outlined in our docs. This way users can have it be random (as it is today), meaning-then-pronunciation, or pronunciation-then-meaning.
If we get good feedback about it, we may turn it on by default.
I actually really like the pronunciation then meaning option.
A) It for sure speeds up my reviews as I can think of the next answer as I type.
B) It probably associates reading with meaning, which is something you want to happen for listening comprehension.
I like that it’s an optional thing.
If you set it as the new default maybe make the random shuffling optional so we can still use it if we want to.
Some part of my brain likes the challenge and that i have to really recall the character twice instead of once, when they appear in random order.
But i might try out the new option as well. Just to see what i like best.
Yep, that was the rationale behind the initial design. I think both styles have good and bad, and if we switch the default we will still allow those to choose the random one if desired. At the very least, I sort of prefer the random one too.
I think one big benefit of the one-after-another approach is that it makes the feeling of progress more visceral, as the number of “items left” will go down more consistently. Whereas with the random option, the number of “items left” could take many questions to go down if you keep on getting the first but not the second question for a large number of items.
Another benefit is that wrapping up the review feature usually wraps up really quick since I just need to finish the current character and any mistake I have made. I use the wrap up feature frequently usually to switch devices.
