One of the things we set out to do from the beginning was to make Skritter as efficient as possible. It takes long enough learning thousands of Chinese and Japanese characters as it is; you don’t want to be slowed down by anything. One of the main ways we make things more efficient is we make sure vocabulary lists play nice with each other, disallowing any sort of wasteful duplication of study between different lists. If words are in two or more lists you’re studying, you don’t study that word any more often than any other word. Period. This is how the system is built from the ground up, and it’s one big way we keep learning going super fast.
And so we decided we needed a similarly over-arching mechanism for removing words, called banning. Sometimes you don’t want to study a word, because you’re not interested or it is simply taking too much of your study time and isn’t worth it. In these cases, you probably don’t want to see the word again, or at least not for a while, even if it shows up in other lists. And so banning makes it so you can prohibit certain words from ever being added, no matter where they are coming from. A plus from the old system, you can ban a word before it’s added, rather than waiting for the word to come up and then removing it.
One concern though is what do you do if you might in the future want to see this banned word again? You might change your mind later, after all. Rest assured, there are a number of ways to bring a banned word back. You can go to any of the lists a given word resides in and unban it from there. My Words now has a page for viewing banned words so at any time you can go through them to make sure there’s nothing you might still want. And when a list would have added a word but didn’t because it was banned, Skritter notifies you while you are studying so you’re aware. With all these mechanisms, it won’t be hard to unban and bring back whichever words you want.
You can also ban individual parts from studies, much like you could remove individual parts. In the word popup, click the red ban button to change the settings. Pick and choose which parts you’d like to have banned, then save your settings. If you have more than one word to ban, though, the best way to ban a bunch of words is by going to a list, selecting the words, then using the word action drop down to ban the selected words.
Coming up next: the new and improved word popup.