Recently I was introduced to the idea of using different colors as mnemonics for the tones. The idea intrigued me because I have what is known as grapheme-color synesthesia (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme-color_synesthesia ). Basically, I always "see" a certain color (that is, I am strongly reminded of it) when I see a particular letter or number or punctuation mark. For instance, it seems utterly obvious to me, though strange to others, that the letter A is red, that the number 9 is purple, and that the question mark is green. For whatever reason, all these English characters have their own associated colors with them in my head, and I find it helps make it easy for me to remember words, names and numbers.

However, as I have complained in the past, all the Chinese characters look pretty much black to me. To the extent that they have any associated colors at all, it is to the first letter of their Pinyin transliteration, but that connection isn't very strong in my head for most characters.

So of course I jumped right into the idea of assigning colors to each tone and remembering that color for each character, a technique which is apparently not unique to those of us with grapheme-color synesthesia. Many people are finding success with this technique just because they are visual learners, and for them remembering a color is easier than remembering a sound pitch or a number. Plus, it makes for easy mnemonics: to remember that the character 鞋 (shoe) is second tone, I just picture in my head a green shoe, since green is the color I chose to represent the second tone.

I think it would be great if Skritter users had the option of using this technique to remember the tones. Here's how it would work: a user could customize five colors to represent the five tones. Then, any Pinyin word with a tone mark would appear in the color of that tone. A Hanzi would also appear in its proper color once the user identified its tone, or if the user was not being tested on its tone.

What do others think of this idea?

levitooker -- On the subjectivity of tone colors, here's is an interesting read...

http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2009/08/11/tone-and-color-in-chinese

I would note that Anki's Mandarin plugin also does this.

http://batterseapower.github.com/pinyin-toolkit/

James

We will do this; it's been on our backburner for 9 months, now. I was planning on just using the standard that's formed around red, orange, green, blue, black for tones 1-5. Is it strongly necessary to have customizable colors?

If the decision hasn't already been made on which colours to use to represent which tones, I feel strongly that Carl's suggestions from that Sinosplice entry's suggestions that murrayjames linked to are the best I've come across (and I quote):

Blue: Sky: high: First tone
Green: Mid-level: vegetation: trees and plants grow up: Second tone
Brown: Earth: rolling hills; downs and ups: Third tone
Red: Action: Anger: Striking: Force: Fourth tone

But I can understand why one might want to keep to Nathan Dummitt's standard, which is already in a book.

Ah, I was too slow with my previous post! ;)

If you offer no customization option, I would highly recommend sticking with the standard red, orange, green, blue, black simply because the majority of the products on the market that color hanzi do it like this. It completely defeats the purpose if one is confronted with ever-changing color schemes.

The anki pinyin-toolkit allows you to customize but the default is the above scheme.

Pleco also offers customization, but I'd definitively be satistfied with the Dummitt standard.

I am for customization, as in plecodict. I have been using it on my PDA for a while now and it really helps memorization. I hope you can implement this feature soon.

I also think customization would be a really good idea. I don't want to start out on one color scheme now only to get confused later by a different one.

P.S. And if you're not going to, I'd like to know now, so I can start remembering the "standard" colors. They just seem so un-intuitive to me, though (doesn't the fourth tone sound like it should be the red one?)

I'll run a poll soon and then we'll decide whether customization makes sense.

I think customization makes sense - I'm not sure I'd want coloured tones as I might see an ad up and have my brain automatically change what tone I think a word is.

I have resurrected this thread to first say that I'm really glad this option made it in. But I think the overall impact of the change is a bit diminished by the tiny tiny text that it's being applied to and the fact that when Skritting, we spend most of our time looking at the sketch area, not the sidebar. Clearly there are space constraints on increasing the size of the pinyin any further, so I suggest an option to colorize the final character.

Right now, after you finish the character, it glows green or red. You already have the start of the grading system implemented, so why not let that bar take over the job of displaying your got it/forgot it status? That would free up the character glow to brainwash us with tone information.

Along these same lines, how about an option to repeat the spoken cue after finishing a character? I really want to pound this information in! When I write a character, I want my brain to see the glow and hear the sounds automatically. And it uses only parts that are already built-in, so it's hopefully cheap to implement?

Yeah, the colorization isn't very emphatic. I don't support the idea of replacing the correctness colors with tone colors, though. I could list several reasons, but mostly I'm thinking that most people aren't as interested in the tone-color associations, but being able to see right/wrong/so-so status is a core part of Skritter for everyone, regardless of whether they want to use the 1-4 grading buttons.

I might suggest just making the strokes of the character colored instead of the glow around them. Worried it would look like a bag of candy, but perhaps worth trying.

For repeating the sound, that might be worthwhile. When I'm practicing, Skritter typically doesn't have any time to repeat sounds (and frequently gets behind), but perhaps they could repeat if and only if they weren't lagging behind.

Is there any chance to re-consider the idea of customsing tone colours?

There is no commonly accepted standard so far. If anything then there is a consensus that people have different opinions on what colour coding works for them. Blue for the fourth tone for me really does not make any sense. It is an aggressiv tone matched by a light colour.

It would be great if you could allow for customisation as Pleco does for example.

We've reorganized development priorities a bit such that we're doing this around the time of shared mnemonics and character decompositions. Sorry for the delay, but only a small number of users wanted to use this, so there's bigger fish to fry--I'm working on getting the active pinyin practice going on right now, for example.

But it will come!