im new to skritter (and writing in general) having worked through a week and the easier stuff, im starting to struggle to remember words.

any advice to help this!

My great realization, last night (all nighter) after my first week is that IF I can memorize the pinyin for words THEN at least I can bring up the characters in a pinyin input method such as Microsoft Asian Language for my Windows XP . Or Google Pinyin. learning that
mao1
mao2
mao3
mao4

gives four different words
猫 – mau1 - cat
毛 – mau2 - hair
峁 – mau3 - hilly
贸 – mau4 - trade

is a far more achievable goal for a beginner than to memorize the strokes and recognize the character.

As I work through the Skritter exercises, as I finish each character I switch to my Microsoft 2007 Word document, toggle into Chinese, type the pinyin, generate the character, COMPARE what I get with Skirtter... IF the character does not exist in MS Pinyin, then I PASTE the character from Skritter into my Word document with a note.

Since I have chosen to start with RADICALS I feel it is likely that some of them will be ancient and rarely or never used alone but appear only as the RADICAL portion of some other character. e.g. FIRE has the form 灬- fire – huo3 - well I guess that DOES come up in MS Word, BUT 氵- water- DOES NOT EXIST in Microsoft pinyin OR in translate.google.com

I would be lost without translate.google.com , by the way.

Anyway, the exercise of moving back and forth between Skritter and Word MS Pinyin helps reinforce the learning PLUS it accustoms your eye to see any differences between the calligraphic CRISP Skritter character and the computer generated character.

I also created a Word Press blog for myself for Mandarin. I post questions and discoveries there. I have already made one friend who is struggling with Rosetta Stone Mandarin because Rosetta does NOT believe in giving access to the translation or even easy access to the Chinese or pinyin and if you can paste those then you can use the translator or google search.

I also post my questions and discoveries in Facebook and in Google Plus Social network and I am beginning to make friends both with students and with native speakers who are willing to help from time to time.

It takes a while to get the hang of it. Especially since most people start with 你好 which are reasonably complicated(when compared with say 一 or 个 anyway). Stick at it though, you WILL get use to it and it builds on itself. The very first characters you learn are by far the hardest. You have nothing to compare them to, and its all crazy and you haven't gotten used to the stroke order rules yet and its super easy to forget them all.

But then the next set of characters you learn is easier. Some of them will share parts with the first set of characters and some will include your first set of characters completely. For instance once you lean 我 (me) then learning 饿 (hungry) is much easier (it's a little hard to see at small font sizes but hungry is just the me character with food particle on the left - makes sense right?).

A technique that helps is to try to make up stories, its hard at first but really does help. Read the first few pages of "Remembering the Hanzi" and google books as that explains it really well.

So don't get discouraged, know that learning characters will get far easier as you learn more.

You're always going to forget things in Chinese in the same way random words slip peoples' minds in English. Of course it's easier to forget things at the beginning, but like kaysik said, as you build more characters/words relationships build that help you remember things.

When I first started learning it was a struggle to even remember one character. Now I can walk down the street, see a new character and still remember how to write it a few hours later so I can look it up. I'm always surprised at how I can remember characters with just a quick glance based on the radicals and components that contain.

cheers guys.

my pinyin is good, ive been speaking for 5 years now. just been too busy for the writing.

i guess your right, just takes time.
thanks fo rthe advice.

do any of you use a writing pad? i can get one cheap but not sure if it will be of any help.

Probably the best way to learn the characters is to study the radicals first. Then you use the radicals and their meanings to build the characters, rather than attempting to memorize a seemingly arbitrary set of strokes.

@thedrunkingpig if you want to learn to write the characters, a writing pad is really, really useful. It's faster and much closer to the actual feeling of writing than using your mouse.

As pointed out before, by starting to study characters based on the components (e g. radicals) or Heisig order is probably the fastest way. There have been studies made on this and for most people you see an increase in number for characters learned already after 200. I know around 2000 and i have been making some notes about time spend when i started and time spend now and i can manage about 2 times more characters per day now compared to then. After a while you will "see" the new characters as combinations of earlier learned characters and sound components. It is also very much more fun then since you then can do this with ease and guess new unknown characters.

Go for a pen, faster, better for your muscle memory and helps making it more fun.