Just wanted to let you know..

We foster a 9 year old Chinese girl and from time to time she loves to practice her characters on skritter. The one thing is that she doesn't understand the English definitions.

With some tweaking it could potentially be an incredible tool for Chinese children as well as foreigners

Glad to hear kids practicing on Skritter. Out of curiosity, how quickly does she write?

I think the "some tweaking" would be an understatement, but you're probably right: if we targeted young Chinese learners, we could make a great tool for them. But we're targeting foreign learners instead, and we'd have to get a lot bigger to try to do both.

But Chinese-Chinese practice (instead of English-Chinese practice) could be interesting if we could get a usable source for the definitions.

To top it all off, the Korean market would be huge:)

She was actually quite slow...but I think that is more because she isn't that familiar with the mouse.

What is very interesting is the contrast in vocab and characters that we know. In my spoken Chinese I am probably at about 4-5000 words...but only at about 400 characters writing.

Her characters are a lot better than mine (obviously) but there are are a fair few characters that she couldn't write but that I learnt very early on.

It has really shown me the difference in learning a language as a child and learning it as an adult. When we learn as adults we focus on the everyday essentials first...where children pick up words (for example)in fairy stories that are never used in everyday life.

If you're keeping score, our 8 year old daughter has just started using Skritter in the past week or so. She enjoys it, but I'm not sure yet whether it is just the novelty factor. She still needs to practice with paper and pencil as well, of course, since Skritter is good for learning characters, but not for practicing penmanship.

Actually Skritter can be pretty good for penmanship if you use a wacom (pad or tablet PC). I use a tablet pc to 'write on' my screen which I find very helpful.

@skdbhunt, @2shanghai - I also use a Wacom (an old, old writing tablet) and Chinese people often compliment me on my Chinese handwriting, even though I have terrible, terrible, terrible handwriting in English.

James

Are you sure when they compliment you its not just because they are so shocked you can even write one character let alone get it right (:

I frequently get complemented for being able to say 你好！ (: