This is a common mistake I'm making. I'm wondering if other people do it too. I just did the review for "humor; yield; adapt to; accommodate" - the answer is 迁就, but I said 就迁.

I am doing this all the time, even in conversation. Sometimes I will switch the characters, see a confused look on people's face, and then switch them again, and then they finally understand.

Is this a problem for you too?

Absolutely. I do it all the time.

It's quite a pain!

Yep, I do it quite often too.

Words like 适合 and 合适 don't help!

Also, when skrittering, the second word of a pair often comes first in my mind, so I start writing it. By the time I realize I'm wrong, the first character is already marked as wrong, even if I know how to write it.

definetely agree

I do it too.

me 2! actually I have been wanting to write about this for a while...happens a lot

Happens to me all the time when I'm speaking, and sometimes on here as well. Once I come up with some creative mnemonic it usually stops.

Yep, mostly with writing. (It's good to know that others do this too, ugh)

I have Adrien's problem, where I think of the second character first and write it (usually because the first character is easy). It's only a Skritter problem, though--doesn't happen in conversation.

More importantly: does anyone have any clever ideas for how Skritter (or some other form of practice) could help with this type of mistake?

I have been pretty happy with word-level mnemonics for this; you can make up a story with the individual characters, or the components of each character, and the order of the story will help you remember the order in which to write things. For example,

众人 - three men are making a human pyramid, and another man is to their right shouting "Everyone! Come look at this!"

James

Actually recently I've been skrittering more slowly, focusing more on the meaning of the words I'm studying, instead of just rushing through them.
Just waiting a few more seconds than usual before starting writing the character just solves the problem for me.

It only seems to happen with two character combinations though, never 3 or 4 (at least from what i remember)

+1, I take it as a positive sign that things are coming from subconscious memory.

@nick Skritter could detect that the character is right but in the wrong position and underline this "so-so" error.


However, Adrien suggestion works for me too maybe because I am not native English and I need to focus better on the mnemonic tips, because sometimes they are harder to remember than the chinese character;)

This looks to me like another example of what Skritter is not best at. Skritter is designed for practising how to write characters (ones that we already know the sound and meaning of). We can use it for learning new characters (and new words), but it's probably not the most effective way.

If your memory works best with sounds, you need to get the noise fixed in your head first. If it works better with symbols, I guess you need to do more in-context reading.

Rachael

I have a problem like Adrien and Nick: I occasionally lose track of whether I'm at the first or the second character, either because I forgot that I wrote the first character already, or because I think Skritter is only prompting me for the second one, or because I'm getting myself of ahead :-)

> does anyone have any clever ideas for how Skritter
> could help with this type of mistake?

There could be more of a visual hint that I am writing a multiple-character word.

The problem might go away if I could enter the two characters side-by-side. This could be done by having two writing zones side-by-side. Only one would have to be active at a time.

It would also be more realistic to keep seeing the first character while I am writing the second one. Two characters side-by-side probably have visual cues that are lost when doing the characters in isolation.

I realize this would not be easy to do with the current layout!

http://screencast.com/t/4Ib0H5e1eQKM

Yes, because of Flash player size constraints, we can't do that multiple-writing-area layout you describe, Kai. It would be cool, though.

Another possibility would be to just display the images of the previous character(s) of a multiple-character to the left of the writing zone, maybe in the background, maybe only when the pen is hovering over the Flash zone.
http://screencast.com/t/pXQ8ewMZh
A little messy, maybe... I'm just saying you don't need to have multiple writing areas, since you're only writing one character at a time, but a to-scale visual reminder of what has already been written could be helpful.

To get a visual reminder of what's just been written, I look over to the prompt...

Why a to-scale visual reminder, and not the characters in the prompt as Byzanti describes?

In theory, the prompt should be enough, but in practice, I think I often don't see the prompt, which is much smaller, to the side, and in a different font. When I am writing, I mostly look at what I am writing (or at the movie I am watching at the same time :-p). I tend not to look somewhere else to see what I have written.

That's true. I think that the design is too complex to be workable, though.