Computer-based character writing practice: Skritter
With the script technology available these days, it’s uncommon for language learners to focus so much on the writing of languages like Japanese and Chinese. All you need to do is recognise a character, and know what it sounds like, to be able to write it on a computer. Even in my own study, I am trying to focus more on reading, listening, and speaking, as it seems like it will take a long time to rote learn individual characters.
On the flip side, learning how to write characters yourself helps make them more concrete in your mind, and can really help you understand them and their relationships to other words and characters. A useful tool I’ve found to help you write Japanese or Chinese (on the computer, no less!) is Skritter. With Skritter, you can practice writing characters on the screen, and the program can help you with stroke order as well as giving useful information about the characters and radicals. It also provides a tracking service so you can see your progress, and focus more on characters that you are having trouble with.
They provide a two week full service trial for learners of Japanese and Chinese (both traditional and simplified), so if you want to improve your writing skills, check it out!
3 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post · TrackBack URI
Entries RSS 
George Saines said,
April 29, 2010 @ 5:34 pm
你好 Wendy, I’m one of the Skritter founders and my google alerts tipped me off to this review so I thought I’d drop by and say thanks for the mention. I agree that it’s a big dilemma regarding character learning, in my first year chinese course they took the sink or swim approach and had us all writing characters inside two weeks, but I know that a lot of intro programs keep people using pinyin for quite a while. Personally, I most enjoy written translations (that probably isn’t common among learners!), so for me the characters were important. However, I’m also on the computer all the time, so I do have to wonder whether Skritter is for everyone!
Also, I really liked your post on a little further down the page about abbreviations on CCTV. I too immediately made the parallel with French, but I hope that Chinese won’t become stultified by resisting linguistic evolution. What made the language so exciting to learn in the first place is it’s utilitarianism. No formal tenses (unlike Japanese), no verb conjugations (unlike romance languages), and the heavy reliance on context for comprehension. I mean, what’s not to like about adaptations like 汉堡包?
Wendy said,
April 30, 2010 @ 6:40 am
你好 George!
Thanks very much for dropping by. And yes, it seems like it’s often up to the teacher/course whether or not you start learning characters from the very beginning. In some ways I feel like I’ve progressed quickly enough without too much character learning in the beginning, but as I am learning more of them (I’m transcribing all the pinyin stuff I do into characters), I find that knowing the character, not just how to say it, is really helping with my general understanding. I guess it’s about finding a good balance between conversation and reading/writing.
When are you going to come out with an iPhone/Android application?
robinglow said,
July 21, 2010 @ 12:10 pm
i like it your work and your interest in permoting these such type of good work because i like programming very much and i am a very good programmer and i have devlop and design lots of programs