At the beginning, I was unsure about whether I wanted to just use regular flashcards in Pleco or Anki, but eventually I decided to use Skritter instead. On one hand I don’t need to know how to write by hand. On the other hand I do feel that using Skritter help me learn the characters better. What I have ended up doing, is to “cheat” freely in Skritter. First of all, I swipe right to read the hints. If I still am not sure, I just make a “generic” stroke on the upper left, which often results in Skritter giving me the first stroke, which usually helps me indentify the radical. Through this “dialogue” with Skritter, I often end up writing a characters that I only barely remembered. Since my goal is not to learn to write by hand, but just to remember the characters more actively than just looking at a static flash card, I feel that this kind of “cheating” is no problem, and actually helps me achieve the goal of remembering how to read the characters.

I have also set up the Du Chinese to Skritter link, which created a wonderful synergy between two great apps.

That sounds reasonable! Trying to keep flashcards and pure vocabulary learning below a certain ceiling is also sensible. Another thing I try to do when I want to work with vocabulary but don’t want to use flashcards (particularly when I want to avoid the increase in flashcards that follows a binge) is to study vocabulary in other ways. This could include etymology, character origins, looking up related words/characters, creating mnemonics, and much more. These activities are all helpful and more interesting than flashcards, and they don’t lead to a hangover either. 🙂

Sounds great! Good luck!