Hi Thomas! I agree that it would be great to be able to customise things more, and such features are coming to Skritter in the near future. However, I’m not sure it will be possible to fine-tune this on specific cards, but rather on the deck level, or maybe the deck section level. The problem is that this particular case is extremely specific. I mean, normally, you do want to learn the pronunciation of characters. Or if you don’t want to learn that, you can disable it entirely. But what I mean is that, assuming you want to learn the pronunciation of characters in general, there are very few cases where this wouldn’t hold true. You’ve found one of them here, but I’m hard-pressed to find other such examples!

This is indicated in the list already, as specified in the article, both in picture and text. The pronunciation written in parentheses can be safely ignored, meaning that they are either never or very rarely used as single characters.

I am considering making a list of phonetic components for my advanced students to study on Skritter. Do you A) know if there are any such lists already created on Skritter or B) think that would be a good use of time for advanced learners? I notice that after the summer, students have forgotten how to recognize and write many characters, so I’m trying to find some intelligent ways to help them. Thanks for any insights you have.

Best,
Jon

You have a hundred of them in my kickstart list linked to in the article! This was partly based on a longer list for all radicals, but it seems to be unavailable now. If you find anything more complete, please let me know!

“Not sure if that was what you were after?”

More or less. But I wondered if there might be a web site that gave a more complete list of terms such as 宝盖头 that I would otherwise not come across. Currently, when I try to remember a character I use my own English concepts, such as “roof like thing with tick on the top”. I thought it might be better to start using the typical Chinese way of describing the same thing.

Yes, I agree. This is what I wrote in the article too:

Learning common radicals is useful, not because they are radicals, but because they also happen to be common semantic (meaning) components.

However, since students sill ask about radicals, I write about it. THe alternative would be that the same students find resources about radicals that are not at all adjusted for second language learners, which would be much worse.