I find as I use skritter I'm getting really good at learning single characters and lagging in retention of longer words (2,3 character words). Since I run through these really fast, I'm guessing the size difference between the 'canvas' for writing out the hanzi and the little dictionary at the side for displaying the definitions and longer words is a factor. Is it possible to blow up the full words at the lefthand side to be bigger? I think this would pay off for people who go through practice really fast, to be sure that the words are being imprinted as strongly as the animated, huge, individual characters.

FYI I have already blown them up as big as I can on my browser.

Interesting suggestion. What do other users think about the font size on the word characters in the prompt? It's something we'd have to change for everyone, as the style on the prompt interface is very tight.

I think one bonus to multi-char word retention will come with definition practice; that's what I'm looking forward to, anyway.

Skritter folks have mentioned things like "definition practice" a few times now.

Do you have any initial indication of how this would work? Would it be something like displaying the characters, and asking the user to enter the definition (or pick from several possible definitions)? Would this include entering the pronunciation also?

Looking forward to seeing this - this would be a major new feature.

I was also surprised when I finally noticed the lefthand size characters that appeared after I'd completed a handwriting practice. They were so small they weren't really noticeable.

So, here's another vote for larger print sign characters.

Yes, I also have a hard time noticing/imprinting the characters together in my brain... which manifests itself in me just seeing the pinyin (often with no tone) and writing the wrong character because I haven't solidified the correct pair of characters in my mind...

if that makes any sense to anyone...

Actually I would love if I would be able to write the whole word at once in one window. I understand that the frame would have to be bigger then, but I think it would make it easier to imprint the whole word into my brain other than just imprinting character by character and then having to remember the word kind of seperately.

I agree with flowtheflow. i just joined skritter and its slightly frustrating when i cant practice words together that belong together. it would help retention if they were to be in the same box. if you could somehow make it so the box is bigger or we could choose on our setting how we want it. That would be great

We can't make the box bigger for a number of reasons, the largest of which is performance -- many systems would struggle to run our Flash window that large.

We are planning to add the rest of the characters in the word to the Flash box itself, though, probably at the same time as we make pinyin and definition practice modes. Perhaps the characters will just line up at the top as they are finished. It'll be all animated and cool-looking and they won't get in the way, if we can pull it off.