I have a question for those of you who have been studying using Skritter for a while. How much of your knowledge of *writing* characters has translated into skill *reading* those characters? How about helping with your spoken Chinese?

James

It's helped my reading skill enormously. That said, I do sometimes see characters that I recognise and would remember how to write in Skritter, but have no idea how to read! It's a bit weird. To overcome this, I've been using Anki with characters as the question and pinyin/English as the answer.

As for spoken Chinese, not sure. It's helped my listening a lot simply by increasing my vocabulary, but I don't practise speaking as much as perhaps I should.

For reading, it has been more helpful than any other SRS method that I use (Anki, Pleco, paper-cards).

I don't practise any spoken chinese at all, sadly.

Haha, I was thinking about this exact same thing. I agree that while Skritter has helped my reading a lot, there are many words I can get correctly here, but would never recognize in a sentence/paragraph.

One big plus to taking classes at a school would be the structured method of using what you've recently learned, especially with reading/writing. When studying on your own, you don't have that advantage. It's much harder to find ways to practice your reading.

Chatting on QQ/Skype has helped a lot, it really forces you to try to read as much as possible.

I guess another solution would be to use a textbook. But, I've never been a textbook-studying kind of person.

Any other suggestions on improving reading?

That's a good question, be honest, I'm with JB, I find that I can remember characters very well in isolation on Skritter that I have trouble identifying in the real world. It isn't that I don't know the characters, it's far more often that I don't know the grammar surrounding them and so can't understand. Sometimes I learn the word far ahead of class (I do spend more time than I should on Skritter). When that happens I often memorize a different, less used context, which befouls my ability to read the textbook-assigned passages which assume you only know one definition for a given word.

What's worked really well for me is actually composing sentences. Reading sentences is tough, but doesn't force me to reproduce the characters. My weekly translation exercises force me to do that, and that's been enormously valuable.

I wish I had some Katsumoto-esque, exciting technique or breakthrough, but I guess I learn the best from good old fashioned written translation. Writing characters on flaming juggling pins and then performing circuses would be a much better story.

My reading ability has shot up too. I get a decent amount of practice because I live in China and am surrounded by characters...everywhere!It may sound funny, but my suggestion on improving reading is to...read! I found a copy of Harry Potter book 6 online and although it's far above my comprehension level, I'm reading the darn thing anyway! It's all online so I sit and attempt to read a line out loud, ponder for a minute what I guess it means, and then if there are words I don't fully know how to pronounce or what they mean, I just copy and paste the whole line into MDBG, read it, drop any really interesting vocab into skritter, and move on to the next line. I'm a big HP fan so I basically know the story line, which helps with the guessing. Here's a link to that if you are interested. Or find something else you like, and just....read it!

http://vip.book.sina.com.cn/book/catalog.php?book=39579

I find that memorizing characters on Skritter, with their individual definitions, helps fairly with both reading and speaking (more with reading). What I'm probably "behind on" is my vocabulary of words (characters in context) -- since I haven't learned all the words composed of characters I know, I won't be able to use them until I notice someone else using them in an article or conversation.

I'm with Lyons when he said above, " That said, I do sometimes see characters that I recognise and would remember how to write in Skritter, but have no idea how to read! It's a bit weird. To overcome this, I've been using Anki with characters as the question and pinyin/English as the answer."

I've found using Anki and Skritter to be a great combination, but I wonder if Skritter could eventually have an option of doing that very thing, so all study is within skritter.

But, to answer your initial question, jww1066, I would say that it has definitely helped me in both my reading and spoken Chinese. I'm SO glad to have Skritter!

Yeah, I think it was brought up a long time ago, but a "character as the question" thing would definitely be awesome.

Being able to write a character when prompted with pronunciation and meaning is an important first step in learning a character. You also need to be able to give the correct pronunciation quickly when confronted with the written character, and the only way to do that is to just read. Vocab words come very quickly once you have those two steps down, I find. I can often remember words after seeing them just one or two times if they are composed of characters I can pronounce without thinking when I see the character, as well as am able to write them. So Skritter for me is a valuable tool in conjunction with other tools, such as Anki for phrase/word recognition, following subtitles, reading internet news in Chinese etc.

I discovered some time ago that learning characters (from cards) in one direction did not mean that I could automatically recognise them - and I think I see the same thing on Skritter. As if it needed another vote, I too would love to have a mode where Skritter would prompt with the character and one had to respond with the pinyin - or definition, but that would be tough since there can easily be several definitions to choose from.

By the way, my wife pointed out that you can get *some* recognition practice by keeping your eyes on the drawing space so that, if a tone question comes up, you can try to answer without looking at the prompt on the left.

And yes, I know reading is the best practice, but it is tough to find much material at my (low) level of mastery. Yes, I can cut unknown characters into some other program to translate, but it gets tedious - and you certainly need something on line to make that practical. Most handwriting recognition is not so forgiving as Skritter since it has no idea what you are shooting for!

You know, I'm spending almost all my time working on the Flash code, getting the pinyin and definition practice modes ready. It's not far off, at least the basic bits of it.

Thank you for that!

Hi Nick, will this functionality have an SRS logic not linked to how well/poorly you know how to write the characters ?

yeah an audio only mode would be sweet. if it was only one character it could just do it this way:

加
加油的加
加

or

家
家人的家
家

Anyway, tack that onto the end of the wishlist, which I bet is of encyclopedic length at this point.

The way it will work once pinyin and definition practice is that you'll have up to four items per word or character: writing, tone, pinyin, and definition. We already do SRS independently on writing and tone, so we're adding two new ones. You'll be able to turn off any of the four (including writing).

There's a lot of logic for how to prompt for the different parts, how to combine them, how to figure out which you know and which you don't, and how to order the prompts efficiently. I have figured most of it out, and will figure out the rest as I finish implementing it. It will be sweet. It won't have audio only prompting, although it may have an option for pinyinless prompting when there is a sound file.

Although, I'll probably release the reading and definition input without an active input method, so you'll have to grade yourself. Then I'll be adding in the ability to type the pinyin, then probably a way to type in part of the definition, for this active recall powers.

Sounds very good to me, thanks for the update.

I am looking forward to definition practice. Due to the ease of use and addictive nature of Skritter I can now read a section of my textbook aloud and then be forced to admit to my tutor I had no idea what it meant. Thanks in advance!

Haha, I've done the same as Dawei a few times...

Reading, writing, listening (comprehending), and speaking are all important aspects to learning a language. I find Skritter helps immensely in learning Chinese (I was without my tablet PC for almost two weeks and missed Skritter immensely - using a mouse is just not the same and I bought a cheap wacom-type pad but it was a local chinese brand that could not do click and drag operations so it didn't work with skritter - as an aside, it would make sense to have a list of writing tablets that do work with Skritter, with a reliable cheap one topping the list).

Back to learning Chinese - my tutor has noticed that my ability to write Chinese characters is better than average given how long I've been studying and this is certainly due to Skritter. I tried just using Skritter before (with some ChinesePod lessons) but it didn't work too well as I didn't use the characters (and didn't know how to use them). I'm now learning full-time so I learn characters, listen to them, answer questions using them (and learn grammar patterns), and do writing exercises using them - skritter is very good for helping to retain the characters (but using the characters and reviewing is also important).

I think if I were to omit any of the above I would make far less progress - for a given set of characters I'd rather learn them well (speaking, reading, listening and writing using them) than just doing one (e.g. learning to write them or listening to them).