"Add Characters When Adding Words" Setting

This guide will explain the "Add characters when adding words" setting on the Skritter website.

Adding individual characters while learning new words can currently be enabled on the website from the User Study Settings page here: https://skritter.com/account/settings/study

Turning this on does not add characters from previously learned words to your review queue. Because this operation is not automatic or retroactive we’ve kept it out of the Skritter: Write Chinese and Skritter: Write Japanese apps for the time being.

If you’ve had this setting enabled from the website or older mobile apps, then the app has been adding contained characters automatically the whole time and no further action is needed. If you’re interested in turning this setting on and want to add characters for previously learned words you currently have two options for retroactively adding contained characters.

Reset deck/ deck-section level progress and re-learn all items, which will now add contained characters
Use the vocab info screen for any previously learned item in a deck and press the “Learn Now” button to study individual words again. Once you’ve studied an item this way the contained characters will be added to your queue if you’re not already studying them from another deck.

Note on Scheduling
Scheduling for these characters can vary depending on the client you’re using or if you’ve studied the single-character words in other decks. On the legacy iOS clients, the contained character scheduling is adjusted based on your word-level grading. Skritter's website and the newer mobile apps do not do this. So, multi-character words will not adjust scheduling due values for contained characters.

Additional Considerations

Turning on this setting does not introduce individual characters during learn or test activities.
Turning on this setting can balloon a review queue very, very quickly (美国 for example goes from 4 cards to 12 total cards added to review)
Disabling this setting will not remove contained characters that have been previously added to your queue

If it isn’t obvious from all the stuff above, this setting is tricky to control and is even harder to explain. If you’re looking to up your character game (and not already using this setting) I would recommend using frequency decks or creating custom study decks for characters really giving you trouble instead.

Single Character Study Decks
In addition to some of the individual character decks above, here are dynamic links to study decks on Skritter to check out.

The first deck comes from a Beijing Language Institute Frequency Database and is based on a character word-forming ability—SUPER COOL! The Skritter Chinese Character Course not only teaches ~150 characters/components but also has section-level videos that cover just about everything you need to know about character learning theory. We’ve also included the nine Taiwan lists @SkritterOlle made, which cover 5568 individual characters.

Happy studies!