I mentioned this as an aside in a previous thread: when Skritter prompts me for pinyin, I don't like switching from the writing tablet to the keyboard. It's awkward, especially when I'm skrittering on my laptop away from a desk, on a park bench or in a café.

Ideally I could write the pronunciation using the pen, in pinyin or zhuyin, but that's not going to happen soon, if ever. I'd be interested to know how others deal with this. Here's what I've tried:

1. Virtual keyboard (Windows 7): it's OK, and useful if the keyboard is very inaccessible, but it's slower than typing, too hunt-and-peck with the pen.

2. Handwriting recognition (Windows 7) is not nearly good enough, especially since it doesn't know about pinyin.

3. Speech recognition would be great... I wonder if some kind of speech-to-pinyin software is available...

4. The "click-to-show and self-grade method", suggested by @sarac, has been working pretty well for me. As she says, "any lessening of quality in review is counterbalanced by the time and annoyance of switching to/from the pen/keyboard. Especially so since I mis-typed often enough that the self-grading doesn't intrude on the flow of practice". Also, with this method, I say the pronunciation out loud before the click-to-show, which is probably better than typing.

One small problem with this method is that when I click-to-show, the word is marked as "don't know", which I then correct to "got it" if I got it right. Call me proud, but I don't like seeing every word I'm tested on as "don't know" by default, even if it's just for a second.

But that's a minor problem. So far I do like the time I save by not using the keyboard at all.

previous discussion here:
http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=99376533#99610732
http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=99376533#100673522

If you are already using the self grade method, you could go one step further and don't practice the pinyin at all. That is what i do; i hide the pinyin and when practicing writing, tones and definition I say the word aloud and picture the pinyin in my head. Then i compare when the pinyin is revealed. Because i have little difficulty remembering the pinyin i rarely have to mark them wrong because of wrong pinyin. It is not perfect but it saves me on total items to review and i have no hassle to go from tablet to keyboard.

Yes I might go back to that. I started out without pinyin practice, but then found it helpful, particularly for extra practicing of tones, which I have trouble remembering.

I tend to use the temporary parts study feature to temporarily do readings by themselves to clear them out, then switch to other parts. (Or clear out writings, and then do the other three together.) This works more easily for me because I'm not adding much at the moment--when adding new words, you can't do this.

Still on my list to figure out better clustering to minimize switching automatically, but it's hard to find the time to get that in.