As many of you have noticed, definition practice has been added! We put it up a few days ago and have been ironing out some of the bugs. It’s still in testing but if you’re feeling adventurous go to the language settings page or open the settings lightbox in the practice page to turn it on.
Some things to know if you use definition practice:
- The definition practice is not immediately turned on for your existing words. They’re only added when you add new words. If you want to study definitions from a list you’ve already been adding from, you’ll have to go to that list and turn it on from where you want definitions added. It works the same as it would if you hadn’t been studying tones and now turned them on.
- There’s currently no way to view your progress with definitions. We’re going to have to redesign the progress page a bit to accommodate all the new data. But don’t worry, we’re keeping track of it all in the backend.
- Sometimes you’ll need to refresh your practice page to study all parts of a word. When a word needs to be studied in multiple parts, such as when you add both the definition and the writing, the part that doesn’t get studied immediately will not be studied until the page is refreshed. There’s supposed to be space between studying the different parts of the word anyway, so it shouldn’t be a big deal.
Also, right now definition practice works like a flashcard; we show you the word and then you click to see the definition and grade yourself. We’ve been planning to do active definition practice, where you type in the definition of the word and Flash magically grades it taking into account things like synonyms and misspellings, but on first blush this kind of definition practice may turn out to be good enough, or better than what we originally planned. It’s faster than typing out the definitions, for sure, and saves us development time. Let us know what you think of its efficacy.
As for reading practice, it’s been enabled for Japanese! Everything I said about definition practice applies to reading practice, except that we’re still very much intent on making it so that you type in the pinyin or reading eventually. Nick tells me it would take too much time to set up the Chinese with flash card style reading practice, so instead he’s going to skip that and go straight to active typing Chinese reading practice. We’re aiming to get that up next month.
We’re very excited to finally get to this point! We’ve been doing all sorts of backend work to support reading and definition practice for about the last half year, I’d say, so hope you guys enjoy it. Now that I can study my definitions and readings, I can thoroughly learn my Japanese textbooks… better get started.